Mercedes Reveals EQE and EQS 'Acceleration Increase' Subscription Pricing

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43713075/mercedes-benz-eqe350-eqs450-acceleration-increase-subscription-pricing/

by djyaz1200 • 3 years ago

25 45 3 years ago

caranddriver.com

anon2912• 3 years ago

I'm never buying a car that can update over the air

throwaway5959• 3 years ago

I’m afraid eventually that will mean not buying a car. Wouldn’t be surprised if non-lojackable cars are banned.

DaanDL• 3 years ago

Maybe the future is not buying cars

hellojesus• 3 years ago

The real solution seems to be jamming network signals or removing the transceivers from vehicles. Some manufacturers make this easy (Ford with the transceiver under a seat), and some make it hard (Toyota where you have to pull it from behind the dashboard).

I've seem people replace the antennas with resistors so the device thinks it's still working, since Toyota routes part of the speakers through it, so disabling entirely would render some of the sound in your vehicle disabled too.

anon2912• 3 years ago

Luckily there is a large secondary market.

nixgeek• 3 years ago

You will enjoy driving “classic” vehicles only in the near future then.

Many automakers already push OTA updates, and the holdouts who had been trying to preserve a dealership and service network by saying you had to take the car in are I believe mostly moving to OTA.

shiftpgdn• 3 years ago

The majority of cars with OTA updates just use a normal SIM card. You can physically remove the sim or disable it for the vast majority of them.

nradov• 3 years ago

The next generation of automotive telemetry will probably use eSIM just like the latest cell phones. There won't be a physical SIM card to remove.

zaroth6• 3 years ago

Your loss I guess? I absolutely love the fact that my 2018 Tesla has all the features of a 2023 Tesla.

Literally hundreds of things made better about the car over the last 5 years, truly useful features that didn’t even exist when I bought it like Dashcam and Spotify, and even safety features, improved performance, and just countless little convenience features added over the years.

Updates for better maps, navigation, routing, faster charging, better AutoPilot, Summon, better hard braking performance, improved pedal feel for regen, better driver profile settings and memory, better SMS integration with iPhone, vastly expanded entertainment options, better iPhone app controls, and truly could go on and on. [1]

So here I have a 5 year old car with 50k miles with absolutely zero reason to consider trading it in for a new model, because it basically IS the new model.

IMO it’s a major advantage of owning a Tesla is getting to enjoy truly meaningful and useful software upgrades that consistently make the car better in basically every possibly way.

It’s just a different level of commitment to their customers than I think any other automaker delivers, versus the legacy “if you want new features you’ll have to buy a whole new car to get them” approach.

[1] https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/history/

singleshot_4• 3 years ago

I’m very excited for you that you like your Tesla. That sounds like a fun experience.

From my perspective, everything that you are describing is software enabled and software has no place in my car. The idea behind eschewing over the air updates for your car isn’t that we like old software; it’s that we hate software and don’t want anything to do with it.

Put another way, if you look at all the features that I want in a car (robust safety cell, powerful propulsion, quiet, smooth ride, rare) none of them can be upgraded without physical modifications. And in fact, once those things are achieved, there is really very little reason to change anything.

In general the trend appears to be in favor of your style of consumption which is cool for you, but I for one am a little concerned that when I get a hundred or so thousand more miles on this 98 SL500 there’s going to be nothing out there I want to buy.

JolaBola• 3 years ago

Why would you need that? Unless you are a racing in your car. Yeah, it maybe useful in collision avoidance but somehow I don't think that this is the target persona.

engcoach2• 3 years ago

Want vs need

mnd999• 3 years ago

This is just silly. Why would anyone pay for this?

And why would they need to do it. Anyone who drives like that is already paying them more in servicing, brakes, tyres etc.

jqpabc1232• 3 years ago

Servicing is becoming auto maker's bread and butter.

From what I've seen in the USA, it's not unusual for a 3 year old Mercedes to need $10k of dealer maintenance.

The first purpose of a car is transportation, the second purpose is service revenue.

chrisbolt• 3 years ago

Even with Mercedes’ 4 year warranty?

jjtheblunt2• 3 years ago

What have you seen in particular in the USA?

I had two Mercedes and they cost way less to maintain than my Honda, and I’m not kidding, though could be lucky.

SubiculumCode• 3 years ago

I get that having a single model that you can artificially differentiate to multiple product lines is efficient for the manufacturer, and not unprecedented: CPU manufacturers do it all the time. Why does it rub me wrong?

I guess it is in part that there is a monthly subscription model that is being pushed, for faster acceleration, but also for seat warmers. And that irks me in the sense that it alters what it means to own a vehicle. It also leads me to think that they will try to crack down on aftermarket mods: If all that keeps your car slow is a chip, replace the chip (i know, easier said than done these days). Its also that it means maintaining a constant relationship with a company. Right now, I buy a car, I'm pretty much done with them, but this way its one more account that takes money out of my bank.

awritawirj• 3 years ago

It also means that when Mercedes decides it's not cost-effective to maintain these subscription features when they're more than six years old, they just go away completely and portions of your car get bricked. What a load of crap. I see Mercedes cars from the 1960s on the road frequently. Mercedes cars made today will never become classics.

Bran_son• 3 years ago

Why does it rub me wrong?

Because "your" car is betraying you and obeying a different master. Once you cross the bright line of "items should be loyal only to their owner", things get dystopian very quickly - subscription seat warmers, DVD players that won't let you skip commercials, TVs that embed ads and spy on you, printers that secretly embed tracking dots on your documents...

It all adds up, until you find yourself living in a cage, with little control over your environment. And trying to take back that control is not only technically difficult, but thanks to anti-circumvention legislation, often outright illegal.

lifeinthevoid• 3 years ago

That's how you lose me as a (future) customer. Let's hope for them that the other brands follow suit.

evo_9• 3 years ago

I'm surprised the auto's, esp. Tesla, haven't figured out that all these software driven 'features' can/should be microtransaction. Normally, I hate those, but in this case it makes sense. Basically, I'm VERY likely to just buy a weekend block of time/access to the Performance Upgrade on my Model 3 when a buddy is in town and I want to show off. Or even an impulse buy at a light after having some BMW M guy needing a smackdown lines up next to me. If I can buy this access for a reasonable price, I'd do it, and they'd make money off me / people like me that wouldn't otherwise pay the extra money for that feature.

Same with 'FSD', which setting aside it's actual self-driving, I would be more willing to pay for that package for a few weeks / month when the family is doing a road trip and having it for highway use is handy.

I wouldn't pay up front for either of those feature, I just don't think they're worth the price, or would be used frequently enough to warrant the expense. I don't need FSD that often, and I don't need to blast off the line a second quicker every time I drive the car, but once in a while? Sure, if the price is right.

silksowed• 3 years ago

face ID scan, click to confirm more power...! very good idea that i think would do very well considering the psychology of how people spend money

engcoach2• 3 years ago

Or even an impulse buy at a light after having some BMW M guy needing a smackdown lines up next to me

That trick only works from a standstill…

singleshot_4• 3 years ago

This sounds like a nightmare, but I’m honestly delighted to see that there is at least one person out there who is looking forward to a future full of renting stuff.

jdeibele• 3 years ago

Came here to post something similar. I just got a Bolt EUV, which does 0-60 in 7 seconds, plenty fast enough to get me in trouble. I'd pay $90 to have a month of driving 0-60 in 3 or 4 seconds to impress my in-laws.

After that, experienced EV drivers tell me that using all that torque eats tires. One said he had to replace the factory tires after 20,000 miles, even with rotating them twice.

What makes this a hard sell for manufacturers: no badges on the outside saying this is an M class or performance or whatever. Maybe they have to add outside screens on the car to show the extra-cost options currently active.

Tepix• 3 years ago

These monthly fees that are not backed by a monthly effort will never be popular.

The car companies seem intent on forcing them down our throats anyway, just like touchscreens.

I would avoid buying such a car. If i happen to own a car with such a feature, i would be highly motivated to hack it.

figassis• 3 years ago

Problem is they first sell you the car. The later they tell you they can make it even better with a subscription, and you realize they are just double dipping.

rektide• 3 years ago

Kind of weird pricing. Full lifetime is 3x the yearly price, which seems like a high yearly cost for sure. The full-lifetime pricing feels reasonable I think? Comparable-ish to one might pay for a gas-engine upgrade.

I'm kind of ok with the $90/mo price. If I want to spend the spring months driving around (yeah would that I have that option these days) & doing trips, like, sure, $180 for some appreciably snappier driving performance could be a fun & reasonable splurge. That said, I've almost never driven a car with >150 hp, only been driven around fast 5 times in my life, so like, I don't actually understand the value proposition of fast cars very much & this might all be nonsense, but there's some sense to me here, & I'm kind of ok with feeding the meter for some extra turbo sometimes. Buying the base unit & having free upgrades sadly makes some sense to me.

It's wild that I'm saying this. Part of me definitely looks at this new emerging trend with absolute horror. Intel has a like 8 dimensional matrix of pricing options you can unlock as either (depending on your hardware vendor) "activation" or "consumption" (usage based) "On Demand" server/Xeon chip services. The list of features: Software Guard Extensions/SGX (at 3 price points), Quick Assist Technology/QAT encryption/compression, Dynamic Load Balancer/DLB for telecomm, In Memory Analytics/IMA for data compression again, Data Streaming Accelerator(DSA) for some new direct-memory-access/DMA engine acceleration. Variety of boxes to subscribe to here.

Part of me gets it, don't pay for what you don't need, hopefully create some more accessible price points. But also, if you want your chips to win, I just feel like you should be getting the tech out so the world can play with it & figure out it's best uses, and gating a bunch of new features just means a regression from this Democratic software philosophy to authoritarianist & closed, where very few have all the decision making, get to learn & advance the thing/feature and that's that. https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/intel_reveals_paid_xe...

Also notably with Intel's new "On Demand" system, not a one of the things you can software enable is - to my knowledge - more clocks/turbo. Yet.

Also worth pointing out, we've been here before. Here's Intel doing it in 2010. Software updates that did unlock more cache and HyperThreading for consumer PCs. https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-18-intel-wants-to-charge-50... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819750

On the other end of the spectrum, we are creating more general programmable matter that hopefully people are permitted to find creative use for, real soon. FPGAs were in total doledrums for a while going on where, but there's been a spate of improvements (particularly coming out of Lattice) and there's reason for some hope AMD+Xilinx CPU+FPGAs could legitimately create really fast software reconfigurable accelerators, with whatever the use case demands.

denysvitali• 3 years ago

If there is one thing I hate is subscription services for HW that I own.

If any automakers starts doing this (and Mercedes is one of them, see the heated seats options), they won't have my money.

I hope I'm not the only one who finds this strategy stupid, especially given the fact that you don't get a discount on the car base price thanks to these "options".

alfalfasprout• 3 years ago

Cars are increasingly becoming closed-source and unmodifiable/tweakable. And the HN community seems surprisingly all for it with most complaints only about the pricing model.

I find that quite surprising.

Mercedes Reveals EQE and EQS 'Acceleration Increase' Subscription Pricing

Related Stories