I used to own a Merc with a phone button on the infotainment system. When you went to press the button, it’d inform you that the telephone module wasn’t installed.
That car was manufactured 17 years ago. The only difference seems to be in the language used in the message.
It’s a poor UX but I don’t necessarily think it’s anything new.
I'd love it to just activate Siri / Google Assistant on my paired smartphone, but actually they'd like to charge me £200 to use their own dubious voice control.
We have a Golf 2016 model that supports CarPlay and Android Auto, have you tried connecting to it? Or not interested in the feature in general (which is fine, just curious)?
I still have such a merc, complete with the button and message in question. I think that implementation is actually not so bad, since you could just purchase the BT module and install it yourself [0], without having to mess with the infotainment system or the steering wheel, which also has phone buttons that behave the same.
Whereas here, if the multi-zone AC system is actually not physically present, it may be somewhat more involved to upgrade on your own.
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[0] It's a Bluetooth module supposed to go in a compartment in the arm-rest. There's already a connector present. But since I don't care to use my phone in my car I never purchased the module, so I don't know if the full wiring is in place and if the radio would use it without fuss.
Ah, that's interesting. I knew it was possible to have it installed and I can't remember exactly what I was quoted at the time, but it would have been well in excess of £1,000. Enough that I had a separate hands free kit installed instead.
Same thing with FCA as far back as '08, if not earlier.
My 08 Jeep Grand Cherokee had a UConnect radio, but if you touched either of the UConect buttons you got an angry NOT EQUIPPED WITH UCONNECT message. Apparently a $400 dealer add-on. Looked at installing it myself and half of it was reprogramming the vehicle with specific software to tell it it had the module, and then "update the sales records" to make it appear as an option on any future Moroney labels.
If cars were licensed like enterprise software, they would detect how many seats were in use for the trip, and we'd have to pay per seat.
(shhhhh don't give them any ideas)
I've had a satellite radio button in my cars for years, but never subscribed. The hardware is there to receive the satellite radio, so it's a content (and software) license I'm missing. Do people not complain about that because satellite radio is not seen as a feature intrinsic to the car?
"I see the vehicle you are running our software on has four wheels. Since we license our software per wheel at $10k a wheel, that will be $40k for the vehicle. Let us know if you want to add the support and/or upgrade packages, which are an additional cost. There is a discount that starts at five wheels."
With the weight sensors added to some of the new electric vehicles to adjust forecast range based on the weight of the current cargo, the equivalent of paying for checked bags a la flying will follow.
"Four bags of groceries detected"
It will be amusing if car licensing pushes people towards other forms of transportation, like bicycles.
We are first familiar with this concept of payment activation in software where all product units are identical and the cost to produce an additional unit is 0. To implement this same concept in a machine is a little funnier. If this means the car units can be produced identically, at a lower cost of production per unit, I understand why companies do this. But it is also a natural human reaction to be frustrated by this concept implemented mechanically where the cost to produce is >0. Both sides have a point.
Pay-walling software features —like this— means you also have to stop the user from modifying or maintaining the software running on the thing I own. Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine? If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price?
Hopefully consumer rights will catch up, and make nonsense features like this go away. But I expect manufacturers to resist this as much as they can, probably tying it into certified safety systems and playing a "think of the children" argument.
>Slightly reductive but if I can't do what I like with something I buy, is it really mine?
Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned.
>If it's not, why am I expected to pay full price?
This isn't really a good argument. For one, it implies that if it's on sale for black friday or whatever, that it's magically fine because you're no longer paying "full price". Moreover, the concept of a "full price" is nebulous at best. Suppose the "full price" of a product is $999,999,999, and the discounted price (with locked down hardware) is $1,000. I doubt that would alleviate your concerns.
> Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned.
Everything comes with software or anti-consumer legalese these days, and I could argue that one should be allowed to modify a local copy of one's software despite a license, but you know what? I don't care. These practices are a direct attack on consumer control and autonomy, and the legal fig-leaf of "licensed" doesn't change this.
You can let them keep chipping away at what rights we have left, or you can fight back. But don't use mere legality as some kind of justification for these practices, or, worse, as a reason to not resist them.
As I said, it was slightly reductive, but does channel a sincere belief of mine: I should be able to choose the software that runs on my hardware.
That could mean anything from a source-available, non-redistributable, personal-use-only control and media system published by the manufacturer with a mechanism to allow me to upload my changes, through to an open enough system that I can just replace the whole thing. There are middle grounds (eg packages or apps) that adhere to set interfaces. You could just replace the HVAC module here.
Without that sort of control it's very easy for software systems to rot away well ahead of the hardware. We've already seen a multitude of subscription-maintenance options for mapping and entertainment. I've had enough. It's my computer running in my car, let me operate it my way.
> Software is almost always licensed, not sold/owned.
Not really. What people usually mean by that is that the IP to the software is licensed, but the copy is owned. Copyright only governs copying and redistribution, not use.
"Audi car keeps nagging car owners who decided against premium features when they bought their car."
Would be appropriate too, I think. It is one thing to just not include a certain feature, but it is another thing to still include a button that only has the function to remind you of a possible paid upgrade.
People thought that they bought a car, but they also bought a relation with a company. Like people who buy a smart TV and think they bought just a TV set. Actually they bought a TV set and a relationship with a TV producer who now keeps sucking up their data and shows ads on top of the programs that they intended to watch. How should I call this? Smartphoneification of everything? Is this a good thing?
Even if features have zero marginal cost, they are important for market segmentation, which is important for reducing the cost for most people by allowing less price-discriminating purchasers to pay more.
Imagine instead this was a button that was labeled, "I'm rich" and pressing it echoed back "Yes you are".
That could be similarly paywalled and used for market segmentation.
Instead, they choose to paywall a feature that has minor benefit like "climate sync" (I'm not sure I even understand what that means, I live in temperate climate).
>This is induced scarcity and I hate everything about it.
I mean, I "hate" having to pay for stuff in stores too (markups and all). Like it or not those "zero marginal production cost" products don't have zero cost to develop, so "induced scarcity" (aka. charging the user) is basically the best way to recoup development costs.
IMO, this is an obvious weakness in the capitalist model. Money is supposed to be a social reward for solving problems for people. But they turn this on its head by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce. This is, IMO, anti-social and should not be rewarded by us as a society. We should reward things that create solutions, not things that create artificial scarcity. It's corrosive to capitalism itself.
I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
> an obvious weakness in the capitalist model... by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce
Which is actually NOT part of the capitalist model at all, but rather social engineering (i.e. socialism) where the government circumvents capitalism for the sake of inducing a particular desired social outcome. In the capitalist model property rights only exist as a consequence of natural scarcity. Copyright does not exist in the capitalist model.
>Money is supposed to be a social reward for solving problems for people. But they turn this on its head by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce.
I don't see how the first sentence contradicts the second sentence. Audi is solving problems (a hot car) for people, by providing a product (an AC). The fact that they're "inducing scarcity" or whatever is orthogonal to this.
>I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly. I find it pretty undemocratic and unjust that the government has forces me to make payments to it (ie. taxes). That doesn't mean it's "corrosive" to a democratic/free/just society.
In my view, it is not orthogonal to it at all, we should maximize utility for society instead Audi is incentivized by intentionally diminishing it.
> The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly.
My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
> In my view, it is not orthogonal to it at all, we should maximize utility for society instead Audi is incentivized by intentionally diminishing it.
If you're talking about utility, the standard argument in support of it would be the same one used for copyright/patents, ie. "even though there's utility to be gained by prohibiting such restrictions and granting access to the product for everyone, the lack of scarcity will eliminate the profit motive from future endeavors, and will therefore eliminate future investment/research making us worse off in the future"
>My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
That's true, but at the same time it seems rather pointless to complain about how something is "corrosive to capitalism" when there isn't an obvious solution. Going back to my previous example, I'd love to live in a world where we can get public services (comparable to today's levels) and not pay any taxes. However, if there's no viable alternative in sight I'm not going to complain about it. I also recognize that even though there might some yet undiscovered funding model that doesn't involve compulsory payments, it realistically doesn't exist or is hundreds of years away, so searching for it seems like a fools errand.
Because that's how they decided to sell it. Why should you pay for a book, music, a movie, software? They're not selling these things out of the goodness of their heart, it's to make money.
You might be new around here, but there's this thing called Free Software where (although that isn't why the word "Free" is there) the marginal charge for more copies is indeed less than five cents and often effectively zero.
Of course modifying the software isn't cheap, unless you're going to learn how and do it on your own time, but that's not a marginal cost
Not so new, but if we price things soley on manufacturing costs Apple products should be a factor 2-3 cheaper while Windows and Office should cost, what, a Dollar max? Not to even think about luxury and brand name stuff. Manufacturing cost is only part of the price calculation, software just sits at one extreme end of the spectrum.
Disclaimer: My private daily driver runs Ubuntu and LibreOffice.
But it doesn't have 0 marginal cost - the R&D that went into developing the hardware needs to be recouped and a profit generated; just because the cost is virtual, in missed profit, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> Why do you consider giving someone what they paid for 'abuse'?
I consider changing good products to use emotional and marketing manipulation to make customers feel bad about not paying enough "abusive". Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
>I consider changing good products to use emotional and marketing manipulation to make customers feel bad about not paying enough "abusive".
This entire statement seems like a stretch. Do you also find it "abusive" that freemium products try to upsell premium features, or that a cloud storage service prompts you to buy more storage after you ran out?
>Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
By the same token, as a paying netflix customer I'm pretty dissatisfied that I have to pay $15/month. I'd be much satisfied and happier if it only costs $0.01.
The option list of Audi os infamous for its complexity and length. It depends on the market so, the German beats the French one by a couple light years. At least last time I checked.
I think you have this backwards. Sure Audi has a lot of editions and packages, but no one else can double a cars MSRP by just adding options like Porsche can.
A couple of years ago I almostanaged to do that with an Audi A4. It's good to see best pratice sharing between brands, like they did with Diesel engines!
This is just my opinion, but I have literally dozens of buttons on my car dash that I haven't pressed since forever. If they were blanks they would constantly remind me of being cheap whenever I looked at the dash.
“Audi was – and still is, but was maybe more so in the past – known for this joy of use, the haptic sensation when you push and toggle buttons. This is exactly what we wanted to bring back in the car, but combining it with the touch-less [gesture control] interaction with the car. We believe… this is like an expensive watch, which you can really use often, and even show off to your friends. For sure we will have [physical controls in the future], yeah.”
Oh I hope not. Audis are by far the best when it comes to what should and shouldn't be a button and their UI and its options are the best I've ever seen. Use a touchscreen where it makes sense and is _better_ than having a button. Use buttons for everything else.
What about that seems reckless to you? There are examples of cars today that use this approach. It sounds like you are eagerly labeling it as being reckless, then assigning blame to the person you replied to as if they intended to be reckless. I do not have that same impression.
That would only make a different problem of having a only a touch screen and no physical buttons, which most people hate. Turns out knobs and buttons are really good UI for most functions. I don't ever want a car that doesn't have a volume knob, preferably one that doubles as the on/off for the audio.
Personally if I ever see something like that on a car I bough I simply came back to the seller "here your fraud-car's keys, I'll wait 24h for a FULL refund, otherwise you'll be contacted NOT by my lawyer directly but by local attorney on duty for commercial fraud and attempted extortion, copy of the complaint we be sent to the press".
Simple as that, AND with the needed trial following not just to obtain a ful refund + expenses BUT also to escalate to a laws that forbid selling things with plugged-in services.
Dear co-Citizens beware: being in a Democracy does not means that anything will go well by nature, we need to enforce democracy every days with common democratic instruments or we will discover that democracy have quickly change for a dictatorship.
Why though, it's a feature they did not pay for. It is horrible UX to show the button for disabled features of course, but if you've been told from the get go that you need to pay for feature X, why would you be pissed that feature X doesn't work when you didn't?
Because it's in the vehicle and the vehicle it's mine. I can not pay for A/C then receive a vehicle with no A/C at all, not one with a present but disabled feature. And not only for this particular case but in general it should be forbidden and hurt really much anyone who try to sell something deliberately bound to services/secondary payments after the formal buying and selling. Similar things apply for software licenses: if I accept something as I pay that's ok, if at home I'm asked to accept something after the payment that's MUST BE illegal because once formally bought something that's mine, at all.
Some cases like that already passed court trials like famous Windows reimbursement fee for computers, I see no differences for cars. Such practices must be annihilated with so much force that no ones for many years to come would try pushing them again.
Similarly ads from a device, not a third party service like ads built-in in SmartTVs or modern Windows desktop must be illegal and societies who try to push them sanctioned so badly that no one else for many year to come would not try the same again.
The meaning of private property need to be reinforced and extended to the "digital"/"hybrid" world before the infamous and criminal "in 2030 you'll own nothing".
I don't see any functional difference between an unpaid-for feature that is disabled by lack of hardware or software.
I can see an argument that hardware for stuff I haven't paid for adds weight and hurts my mileage. Or maybe the slippery slope argument: for now it is an option that you pay for up front, next year it's an option that you pay for every month.
The point is: I bought the hw, the OEM must not have any form of control on it, it can protect intellectual property imposing non-duplication of it's tech but nothing more than that.
If something is not there it's not mine. If it's there and disabled it's mine but I can't use it, and that's totally unacceptable.
>The point is: I bought the hw, the OEM must not have any form of control on it
What does "control" mean in this context? Obviously there's nothing preventing you from modifying/manipulating the car by whatever means you see fit. The software that's included with the car is simply refusing to operate the AC. I don't see how that's any different than buying a piece of software that refuses to do a given functionality, even though all the requisite hardware (ie. a CPU) is present.
They don't have control over it. They sold the guy a car that has a button that does nothing, and they asked him if he wanted to buy the hardware to make the button work and he said no. The hardware isn't on the car. Even if the tri climate syncing hardware was present, it'd be silly for you to decline to purchase that option, go home, press the button, then drive it back to the dealer to demand a refund. Why would you buy it in the first place?
Has anyone priced the map updates? A friend told me how he updated firmware to change various things, learning in the process it's possible to adjust the turn signal (interval, etc). Fairly entertaining stuff.
These type of messages usually go away when you press harder, hold press hard or use a hammer. Me talking to the car : "No car, plausible deniability won't work with me."
The reporter didn't reach out to Audi for comments... Maybe that sync button wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, with this car or level of trim?
I think this has been misreported. This message is actually reporting that the car lacks the required AC hardware for that function. It's not a software feature.
Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story. It's not a paywall any more than any other hardware addition is a "paywall".
Ehh.... Audi's functions on demand does explicitly say that "the hardware for the functions that can be activated subsequently is installed in all vehicles at the factory" to reduce production costs [1], and the e-tron is one of the vehicles they're pushing this hard in.
According to the reddit poster, the Denmark e-tron doesn't come with multizone climate standard, unlike most of Europe. And the function on demand store doesn't appear to have rolled out to Denmark yet, and climate zones doesn't appear to be one of the functions you can buy elsewhere (because it's standard outside of Denmark?) So it is literally true that it's not a post-sale option/paywall right now.
But I strongly suspect that whatever hardware is needed is actually there and that this specific car will get the option to purchase the usage of it in the future once the store is rolled out to Denmark.
So if they want to upsell this feature in the future, the actual cost of installing the physical button (five minutes in a workshop) would dwarf the cost to install the hardware (0, already there).
And so they decided to apply asshole interface design towards these customers. That's not a great solution.
“Someone spent time to make it shit”
It, unfortunately, applies to a ton of situations where instead of doing the simple, not asshole kind of thing, they chose to make the thing annoying and/or hostile
> Although I agree that if the car isn't capable of a function, it shouldn't have a button for it, that is a very different story
Maybe I misunderstood something but isn't that the whole problem discussed here?
The important quote is this one: "Blank buttons aren’t rude," wrote the owner. "This one is reminding me that I’m cheap.". Obviously nobody expects to have functions when they haven't been paid for, but having a hardware button for it plus a message telling you you haven't purchased what was attached to this button is pretty bad.
Are you sure? I have a VAG group car with the same sync button and it simply ensures that the set temperature is the same on both sides of the car. As this car already looks like it has automatic AC that shouldn’t require additional hardware, unless this is some fancier ”sync” than mine..
That's how it is in older Audis. You don't order a feature - you get a plug for a button. If you retrofit it later, they add a button. What they did here is absolutely 100% tacky, shame on them. All of it, but especially the wording of the message.
I sure hope they learn from this and never do it again. Saying as a die-hard Audi fan.
Why tacky? I get it, from their point of view, it saves costs of manufacturing and logistics ("Customer wants car with button that does feature X, dealer only has cars without this button, now customer has to wait for a different car to be shipped or the button to be shipped and installed by the dealer, which will cost a few hours of the service department's time").
Of course they should've had a "Customer experience" department who would've told them how this improvement of their workflow would annoy the customer and look bad for them.
Most cars (and I would expect this in a luxury car) have at minimum dual zone. The article mentions the car does not have the tri-zone option. So the sync button should set the same temperature on two zones and if they already are the same do nothing. I don’t understand why this message is necessary at all.
Yeah it's funny that this is making the rounds as some kind of outrage when the hardware actually isn't present. There are plenty of real cases where the hardware is installed but disabled. Tesla has done it several times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost").
Probably an accident, but assembly lines are often optimized. I know that my old Isuzu trooper had wiring for heated seats. I just had to install a button to activate it and get a seat from the junkyard to hook in.
It really depends on how a manufacturer does it but in some cases, it's cheaper to install the part and just deactivate it if the user doesn't purchase it instead of tooling two different lines in the factory
> Tesla has actually installed hardware in cars and locked it behind software paywalls, multiple times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost", maybe more I'm unaware of).
The most vaunted feature of teslas, "Full-Self-Driving" (note, not actually full self driving) is also a clear example of this.
It's $10k, and it's a 100% software update for all modern teslas. The FSD stuff, as I understand it, is all on-car (i.e. no remote tesla-run service involved), so you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware already there.
This is equivalent to saying that Microsoft shouldn't charge for Office because "you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware" to do word processing.
It's not immoral to charge for software. There's a difference between charging money to add a toggle button for already existing heated seats on the touchscreen vs. charging money to license the most advanced driver assist software available to the public, still under development.
See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried us out of a world primarily constrained by material scarcity is being naively applied to an area of one which does not.
Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.
Isn't the scarcity dynamic simply... shifted left? Your point is that it's trivial to duplicate software and distribute it and there's no (or extremely low) incremental cost in doing so, but we both know the cost of software comes from, you know, people who have spent time to learn how to write software and then dedicating their waking hours to do so for years on end. There's scarcity in the number of developers available to perform that job.
Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.
I am actually sympathetic to this view somewhat. Copyright is not an inalienable right, it's something that we decided as a society to grant to people because we think the benefits outweigh the costs, and that may not be true. Personally I would be in favor of radical changes to copyright such as reducing the duration to something like 5 years. Artificial scarcity is useful but life+70 years of artificial scarcity is far beyond reasonable.
And yeah, the calculus here was to outfit every vehicle with the hardware, whether purchased or not, because the cost of the hardware is made up for not merely in potential future conversions/purchases, but in the ability to collect reams of data from a fleet of vehicles constantly annotating and sending back information to their model.
To wit, the FSD stuff is indeed all on-car, but the FSD-as-a-work-in-progress-constantly-evolving requires significant tesla-run services: they ML work is being done centrally, and then updated models are pushed down to the cars to, hopefully not run down innocent pedestrians in the street.
The difference there is that Tesla still gets value out of putting FSD hardware in cars that don't buy it because they can collect data. You can't say the same about an air conditioner.
I don't have a Tesla, but the hardware side of things is probably not close to $10k, and probably already being used in a multipurpose fashion. What I'm saying is, aren't you paying the $10k to use the self-driving model?
People will be abused to the extent they allow. I'm never going to buy this stuff. No wifi in my oven, either. No cameras in my TV. Manufacturers, know that if you put inappropriate computers in the product, I'm not going to buy it. Keep it simple and minimal and you will get my money.
It's not the 0.1% money they're after, it's the rest. Keep your money (or don't, you may cave under your family's pressure). There's too few of us to have an impact.
What about the GDPR? If this is a pure software function that can be purchased, it is linked to the purchaser. Subsequent owners? Other drivers? Will the service be turned off when the driver sells the car?
What if the owner simply stores his vehicle and doesn't drive it? In the interim, Audi (as Google is known to do) end of lifes the service? Then what?
Let me point out that this particular service isn't the only one. :)
Which services are essential? A/C in Texas? Certainly. What about in Norway? Maybe not. What might be essential for you may not be to another customer.
Interesting that no one mentioned IoT or baked-in Sims.
This comes off more like name calling than dialog to me. Personally I drive an old Toyota Corolla that is about as close to the base model as one could get (windows doors and transmission are manual). There is nothing extraneous in that machine as far as I can tell. I know perfectly well that my car is the cheap model and I would need to pay extra for some automatic windows, but I would be annoyed if I had a dead switch on the side that does nothing.
From the article it sounds like the manufacturer removed the hardware but left the button and didn’t do a great job patching the gap with good UX.
This is just bad UX design and people have a right to be annoyed about these kinds of things.
This is different. Generally, if you buy a base model car, it is missing buttons that would be available in a higher trim. In this case, the button is clearly there - it was cheaper to leave the button there and to lock the owner out using software.
It seems quaint now since we all got so used to it, but this is called an anti-feature. Someone spent engineering time (and every customer is paying for that) to make this thing less useful.
It's actually the high-end cars that are on the forefront of moving features to subscriptions, starting with BMW's CarPlay subscription (well they changed their mind), to remote start (Mercedes charges a subscription that Toyota was blasted hard enough for to reverse), to Audi's built-in navigation...
Different trims have different features isn't a particularly new phenomenon. I think the main novelty here is that Audi decided it's easier to leave the original button instead of replacing it with a nonfunctional unlabeled button (which is how most cars do it)
Make sure when buying a cheap electric VW to budget a weekly 2 Euros (or 4 Dollars, for the Volkswagen Audi Group In North America models). This will be the subscription cost to tell your car to start charging at night, when electric prices are lowest.
I seem to recall that BMW were going to put Apple CarPlay behind a subscription. Even if you can get behind paying for what is purely a software feature in a car, introducing SaaS is beyond the pale.
That car was manufactured 17 years ago. The only difference seems to be in the language used in the message.
It’s a poor UX but I don’t necessarily think it’s anything new.