The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions [Update]
www.motor1.com
The 2025 Audi A3 looks sharper and comes with more tech, but you will have to pay a subscription for some basic in-car features.

So far there’s subscriptions for cruise control, adaptive beams, various navigation options, apple/google integration and my favorite, dual-zone climate.

  • KISSmyOS@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    “Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently”

    This fact, hidden somewhere in the middle, makes the entire article pointless.

      • laxe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        8 months ago

        Just like a movie is already available for download on the Internet but you must still pay to download it. Unless yarrr not a fan of artificial scarcity.

        • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          But the movie is not on the computer in your house.

          This would be closer to buying a house, and a washer/fridge are both installed, just turned off, until you pay extra to switch them on.

          The hardware and software are already in the car, and you would have already paid for both when buying it. Adding a subscription to enable them after is just skimming off the top.

          It might be a different story, if the price included them installing the relevant hardware onto the car separately, but not in this case.

          • laxe@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            8 months ago

            We already built the expensive Internet infrastructure that allows any digital media, including movies, to be delivered to your computer for virtually $0 extra cost. However, even though the infrastructure was built you are “not allowed” to access the digital media unless you pay some arbitrary price.

            In your example, having a washer/fridge installed in the house is not that different from having an Internet router installed in your house. In both cases the infrastructure is readily available and costs nothing to use but you cannot access the services for artificial reasons.

            I’m obviously not defending Audi as I think it’s a ridiculous concept but this is already happening at a large scale.