[gruez]

>It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option.

So exactly like software licensing? Most apps nowadays don't even require a purchase to download. The download is free but you need to pay $4.99/month subscription to use, or $99.99 for a "lifetime subscription". The code's are all there. The author just doesn't want you to use it.

[roysting]

That’s not exactly the same. You don’t get to have a car for free with basic driving functionality and then pay for additional features once you realize the car is useful and the people do made it deserve to be paid for their work, which they were willing to meet you have for free in its basic form.

This is something far more heinous, you bought a thing for a lot of money and just in order to extort even more money from you, they simply disable/lock away a feature that you technically already possess.

A better analogy in software might be that you bought a video game for $60,000 and the only way to beat a lower level boss without spending 2,000 hours trying to, is to pay the developers another $5,000 for a super weapon.

[wongarsu]

So more like enterprise software

[roysting]

Since you mention it, yes, in many more ways than may immediately be apparent to most people

[Telaneo]

Ahh, DRM-ed cars. I should have seen that one coming, really.

[QuantumFunnel]

Geohot should focus his attention on jailbreaking cars now

[xethos]

You're gonna love finding out who was behind the founding of Comma.AI, which adds self-driving to cars that shipped without it

[jasonjayr]

They saw the "You wouldn't download a car?" meme one too many times, and panicked.

[stringfood]

this reminds me of the old IBM tabulation machines that were sold in 2 different models at different prices, the cheaper one just had a metal tab inserted to limit the processing speed - you could remove the tab to unlock full speed

[prmph]

As it should be.

You'd prefer they get nothing for the effort they put into developing the software?

[acheron]

I’d prefer to pay up front to buy the product, the way everything was sold up until around 2012, and not have a “subscription” scam.

[prmph]

The vendor of a piece of software decides how best they'd like to be paid.

A subscriptions approach allows them to avoid demanding a big payment upfront, and allows them to continue improving the software without you having to pay substantial sums to get new licensed versions. It has pros and cons vs licensing, but is a legitimate monetization strategy.

That the bits already exist on your machine is irrelevant. Your entitlement to use the bits is what is at issue here. Being already in possession of stolen goods does not entitle you to use them.

[vel0city]

It's a car. There's already a big payment upfront. You're already shelling out $40,000+ on average in the US these days. Is that not already a big upfront payment?