Next up, Anti-lock brakes as a Subscription Service. ASS.
So you just go to a crack website and search for the suspension crack. A few months later while riding a very smooth ride over a thousand dinosaur corpses, your computer tells the car to steer to the right abruptly in the 75mph freeway.
We are pirating car suspension now holy shit
You wouldn’t download a car
They tried this with heated seats and no one wanted it, what made them think would we accept this?
German car makers have become such a joke in the last decade…
BMW is always making headlines with this crap, are there any other brands doing this shit? I know Hyundai IONIQ has a free trial for you to be able to unlock your car and whatnot with an app, later they will do it subscription based.
Most manufacturers are doing this.
Most people don’t seem to care since they understand there are ongoing server and infrastructure costs.
There is no justification for “server and infrastructure” for a fucking car. No part of a car should require a single penny of server costs over the entire lifespan.
I don’t get what you mean.
The app is intended to remote start your vehicle when you’re out of range of the key fob. I’m not sure how you’d propose that function works without servers and infrastructure.
Oh look, another reason not to buy BMW, I’ll just add it to the other 456788656752 reasons.
I was a BMW mechanic from 2009-2012. I can’t believe anyone buys them after what I’ve seen. The engines are all made of plastic and start to literally crumble to pieces and leak oil from absolutely everywhere after ~70k miles. We had to have customers sign disclosures on these cars because inevitably they would just crumble to pieces when we went in to replace one part and we’d end up having to replace others to reassemble it. Or we would pressure-test the cooling system to find a leak and end up creating several more.
On their V8s there’s a plastic cooling tube that runs from front to back on the engine. The tube itself is like $10 but you had to disassemble the entire engine to access it so it would cost several thousand $ in labor.
We eventually started selling an aftermarket CNC aluminum one that was threaded and expanded into the hole. We would just beat the old one out with a hammer and thread the new one in in a couple hours and they’d never have that problem again. Why BMW couldn’t think of that is beyond me. The people who did made buckets of money selling aluminum tubes for hundreds of dollars just because they could.
You might expect cost cutting like that from a Kia or something but not from a car that’s advertised as a premium brand and sold at premium prices.
You’re literally just paying more for less.
The Buick 3800 had a tube like that on top, it would crack from thermal stresses and piss out hot coolant. There was an aluminum aftermarket replacement like you describe but it was Dorman and a cheap fix. Buick also addressed the problem in later versions. I miss that engine.
The problem is that once one manufacturer starts doing this, they’ll all do it, so you won’t even have the option of buying a new car without a subscription.
I’m so gonna install Linux on my future car
In Lemmy, Linux is always the answer.
