[WalterBright]

> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality

It was true. The heating wires in the seats were already installed and the consumer paid for them and owned them.

I remember in the olden days some compiler vendors added a fee to "unlock" floating point code support. That was never popular (I never did such with my compilers.)

[kevincox]

Money and prices are fungible so it isn't really possible to prove anything. But there are two very reasonable ways to look at it.

1. Those who purchase the heated seats cover the cost of all of these heating wires. So they are paying much more than the raw cost (but presumably less than if their cars needed a separate / modified production line).

2. The manufacturer is paying these costs as a "marketing fee" hoping that they will recoup their investment (and more) when people pay for this feature.

I agree that this model feels wrong but after thinking about it I have convinced myself that this can be a good thing. It allows those who what the feature to pay for it, without removing the option for a cheaper model for those who don't want or can't afford the feature.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back: https://kevincox.ca/2023/05/14/ethics-of-locked-hardware/

[friend_and_foe]

OK, first off, your blog post uses an entirely hypothetical, fictitious cost graph, anyone can create a fictitious graph to support their hypothesis. I highly doubt an actual cost graph on a car with actual costs would pan out the way you're looking at it. With that out of the way...

If the hardware to perform the capability is in the machine I bought, it belongs to me. I paid for it. I don't care if you discounted the price below your cost to produce, I gave you the money and you gave me the thing, its mine. No amount of legalese will change that, it is a simple fact of life. I'm paying for the gas to lug the hardware around with me everywhere I go. The hardware itself does not require software to function, you need a heating element and a switch, you can't even make the argument that you're paying for a license to the software without which the feature will not work. Even if a device does genuinely need software to work, unless the hardware can be used for other things and someone can purchase or create competing software for the thing, again, the hardware is mine and you don't get to tell me what to do with it. It's less like purchasing Windows for your computer and more like purchasing firmware for the proprietary WiFi card you just bought.

Those who want the feature can pay for the hardware. Make a car without it. If it's in my car and I didn't steal it it's mine, period. Even if they decide to put them in every car and charge me a one time fee to turn it on and even make that transferrable with the car I don't care, you can't gimp my property and sell it back to me, how is that different than ransomware? Make a car without it or charge for it for all cars it's in. It is that simple.

Off topic, we talk about e waste and what not but then we justify this form of waste by saying it reduces cost by streamlining manufacturing. This is bullshit. If it reduces costs then make it a standard feature. Why don't they? Because it doesn't reduce cost. It increases cost for every item manufactured and that cost is recouped by the subscription fee. In other words, they do it because it is profitable. And it's profitable not because it reduces cost, but because people have to pay a recurring fee to use the thing forever, and because it's valueless on the secondary market, you can't even pull one at a junkyard. If they charged a one time transferrable fee to turn it on I doubt they'd be saying it reduces cost, because it doesn't. But some people fall for this hand waving, and as a result thousands, possibly millions of cars are out there with device in them that are going for two hundred thousand mile ride right to a landfill, brand new and out of the box.

[screamingninja]

Your concept is mathematically sound, but if there exists an opportunity to double dip to boost profits, what would make a corporation turn it down? As you noted in case #1, companies are paying much more for the materials. Consumers are still ultimately paying for it.

The entire point of amortizing the upfront costs is to keep the consumers hooked by charging a smaller recurring amount that stings less but certainly adds up to a bigger amount than the original upfront costs.

Besides, why would a company go through the added hassle of creating and managing a subscription model and risk pissing off customers through this nickeling-and-diming if not for more profits?

I am sure that there is still some silver lining to this scenario (e.g. I live in hot climate and don't need heated seats), but I fail to see any that apply to a broad number of consumers.

[kevincox]

> companies are paying much more for the materials

They are paying more for materials but less for manufacturing costs and overhead. The total cost is less. So by your logic consumers are paying less than before.

> keep the consumers hooked by charging a smaller recurring amount

Yes, I disagree with the subscription model. I am talking more about one time payment for a hardware-locked feature.

[screamingninja]

> They are paying more for materials but less for manufacturing costs and overhead

I suspect this is a complex, wicked problem. What about the marketing costs, subscription management overhead, and the ensuing PR damage?

[pixxel]

What’s the additional weight of heated seat tech? Any impact on fuel costs for those that don’t want heated seats?

[vasco]

It's not like there's no precedent, almost any significantly complex analog design will include a bunch of hardware that is disabled on the customer chip even if it's there, commonly GPUs and CPUs. There's more gadgets like this where it's cheaper to produce the same thing for everyone but price them differently.

[JoshTriplett]

There are two common versions of this. There's "produce the same chip for everyone, test it, disable the bits that don't pass, figure out the maximum speed it runs as, sell things that turned out better for a higher price", which seems quite reasonable for a process with variable yield. Then there's "produce the same chip for everyone, soft-disable features for people who don't pay to unlock them", which seems much less reasonable. (Perfectly legal, and should be, just obnoxious and unpleasant.)

[xnzakg]

Completely agree. Only issue is that this is based on the defect rate being high enough that enough lower-bin units get produced. Could argue that at that point the price of the higher end units could be lowered a bit, but that might still be outside some people's price range... This seems like a difficult problem to solve in a good way. On one hand it wastes resources, on the other hand it has the effect of the buyers willing to pay more for the higher end models to lower the price of the locked down models further.

[ssharp]

I suspect one reason why this flopped so heavily with consumers is because heated seats are a well-established luxury feature, in which consumers clearly see a line between the hardware costs and the upgrade price.

When you eliminate that line and recognize that you've been charged for hardware you're not using, it feels wrong to many. I doubt many people realize any feature limiting in something as obscure as a CPU.

[toxik]

The reason it flipped is that it’s a SUBSCRIPTION. That’s just insanely obvious nickel and diming.

[ano-ther]

I also wouldn’t pay for this. But the economics are more interesting.

BMW and AWS ran a quantum computing challenge two years ago. One of the tasks was to figure out all the combinations of features that need to be tested (sometimes destructively) [1].

I would imagine that having features installed in all vehicles provides a less taxing testing regime than having a physical option.

And in addition, it will be cheaper to just manufacture one version of a thing (and then switch in software).

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/quantum-computing/winners-annou...

[screamingninja]

> I would imagine that having features installed in all vehicles provides a less taxing testing regime than having a physical option.

Curious to learn the underlying economics, but not sure how software-locking features would make testing any easier. While different configurations would create somewhat unique feature-sets, not having to test some features on a certain percentage of vehicles (I imagine a testing technician looking at the missing buttons and writing down "N/A") seems more efficient than having to test every feature on every vehicle in an attempt to oversimplify.

[ssharp]

I'm sure BMW could make a case where between 1) not needing to manufacture non-heated seats anymore improves manufacturing efficiencies and costs and 2) the people paying for the subscription brings in enough revenue that BMW can sell the car for the same price as it was without the heated seat hardware.

However, no consumer is actually going to believe that and they're just going to assume they'd paid for something they don't get value from without having to pay more.

[joot82]

I just wonder why they're so obsessed to make heated seats an optional feature to charge for... it comes standard these days on so many other cars in lowest trim, including Volkswagen (which is considered less premium in Munich). If they see scaling benefits by equipping every car with heated seats just do it and price it in the base offer. The backlash from this probably cost them more than they can ever raise through a seat subscription.

[hnthrowaway0328]

Are you him? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

[Matheus28]

That’s him. The easiest way to summon him is to post anything compiler related, especially in the C family.

[WalterBright]

You rang?

[JimBright]

9 minutes to reply. Are you off your game?