Will once again re-up the concept of a “right to root access”, to prevent big corps from pulling this bs over and over again: https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access
The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled.
Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free.
Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0].
I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car.
>enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default?
Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns.
I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat.
The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF"
The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons.
These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.
Yes, generally you can disable on demand, but Volkswagen now sells the feature as a subscription. So you need to pay to enable. Maybe this is because it reduces the lifespan of the LEDs. Who knows.
> handicapping it for emissions reasons.
Volkswagen sells you another subscription for that now, at least for their electric vehicles. You can buy the option if you want your EV to perform as it's designed.
Emissions is a completely different beast. However their 140HP and 170HP TFSI engines had no different parts rather than the mapping.
Manipulating engines in a way which alters their carbon footprint is a sensitive topic, and while I was positive towards diesel systems, the particulate matter they emit, the fog they cause (see Paris photos, it's eye opening) and German engineering at its finest (i.e. Dieselgate scandal) soured me from diesel's automotive applications, big time, permanently.
You can also buy "for life" subscription (around £600, if I remember the news about it correctly), so you could also say that the stronger engine costs 600 pounds more when you purchase the car. Not too different to buying the cars in the past: more powerful engine adds to the price tag.
Same is true for the internal combustion engines. Since they already developed the ability to store multiple maps and change the mapping when required. :)
But, where's the value in that, I mean for shareholders, innit?
By selling the same hardware with multiple tiers of functionality artificially locked behind increased prices, it becomes profitable to develop and manufacture products that would otherwise not make economic sense. This occurs when there aren't enough potential buyers of the full-featured version at a price that makes the full-featured version on its own profitable, but the sum of all customers at all price/functionality tiers is profitable. i.e. this model results in products that would otherwise not exist.
I have mixed feelings about that argument. The main one being that it's not much of a stretch to go from that to "the full-featured version sold at price X would be profitable, but because most customers are willing do do without the higher tiers of functionality, we can make even more money by selling a reduced-functionality version at price X, and charge a premium for the extra features", and it sure seems like that's what a lot of American businesses do. But I assume at least some of the time, it really is the former and not the latter.