There is a disconcerting shift taking place from one off purchase of car options and features to a subscription model. I don’t like it Is this how they hope to recoup the eroding revenue from servicing?
This is the range of stuff available on a BMW… the offerings vary in scope and price in France.
We are heading to a situation (which Tesla has already reached) where the car you buy isn’t actually under your control, it remains under the control of the manufacturer. I think this is worth a debate, but I haven’t seen anything in the motoring press.
Yes John, I watched half of a depressing video in which several economists predict we are moving into an era where owning stuff is rare and renting stuff is making the rich exploit even more so the sick bastards can amass bigger fortunes.
Take EV’s will they really save the world or just create a huge rental market? Servicing, hardly anything to do on an EV…
35 year mortgages are now pretty std in the UK.
Fully agree that this is a disturbing trend.
With that and the proposed speed control on future new cars, I’d seriously consider purchasing an older used car.
No doubt in the passage of time, there will be hacks available to restore full functionality.
It does remind me of the situation with IBM mainframes of old (& maybe present??) where reportedly an upgrade just involved an engineer flipping a switch!! Or was this just a myth??
This was the/is the mantra of the WEF and godfather Klausie, “you will own nothing and be happy” .
No they wont and neither will the swivel eyed loonies.
I remember in one factory where I worked, the Techie came once a month cos that box in the corner had hiccups, 10 mins late he was gone and everything ran fine for about another month.
I wouldn’t have a choice anyway, it is many years since I was able to buy a new, new, car.
As to speed controls on cars, I hadn’t heard of that but welcome to the world of heavy vehicle operators who have had such a thing for many years which forces them to face the ire of motorists everywhere when lorries of similar, but not the same, speed capability (because of weight/gradient etc) hold up traffic for mile after mile. Not an option to back off if it condemns a lightly laden lorry to hundreds of kms of below maximum speed and efficiency.
Speed controls in any vehicle are dangerous without a system of temporary override in place.
I’m sure @Corona could rephrase it slightly but in essence he is correct - there was a stat flying around the other day (unverified but plausible) that those on salaries of £1,000,000 plus in the UK have enjoyed an average increase of 32% over the last 12 months whereas the rest of us have negative real world “gains”.
As inequality worsens the only real question is whether there will be revolution or whether everyone will just doff their caps to the rich and knuckle down to lives which are nasty, brutish, and short.
I’d like to think revolution is in the air - but the evidence so far is for the cap doffing.
Almost 11,000 people in England were hospitalised with malnutrition last year, as doctors warned that the cost of living crisis has also led to a rise in “Victorian” illnesses such as scurvy and rickets.
cases of malnutrition have more than doubled in a decade and have quadrupled since 2007/8.
Cars are like that already. A lot of the paid options are simply software switches.
I read that a motorcycle manufacturer (maybe KTM) leaves all the options on for the first month of ownership and then you have to pay if you want to keep them.
Haha, that’s sneaky but also quite clever of them.
As long as it’s entirely optional stuff then I think I’m kinda ok with the idea. I wouldn’t however want to suddenly find things like abs or the horn stop working because my direct debit failed this month.
I guess the risk is that people start hacking their motorbikes, cars, whatever and potentially unknowingly doing damage in the process to their vehicle.
Going back to what a previous poster wrote - Klausie, “you will own nothing and be happy”, a few years back I was head of a call centre and had a large (200 head) group of young people manning the phones. A discussion started one day about not being able to afford a mortgage / rent, cost of living, etc. The young ones suggested they would rather go working down a mine every day of the week or picking fruit / veg every day if in return they got a roof over their head and enough food to eat. They took a vote and 89% of them agreed with this and said they would be happy owning nothing.
We had one when we first came to France, Gendarmerie bleu, it still had the hole in the roof where the bue light went (it was also the first 4 door car I’d ever owned)
Certainly true. For example, to upgrade from an IBM 4341 model group’1 (0.8 MIPS) M/F to a model group 2 (1.2 mips) involved minimal engineer activity and card swapping. Likewise upgrading them from 2MB to 4 MB just involved a couple of cards but the monthly rental hike was significant.
In 1983/4 IBM went from a rental to a sales model, the opposite of the current trend. Even though mainframe profit margins were 90% on some machines, it should have been obvious they were selling off the family silver. The next opportunity to regain that ground was outsourcing, now they have flogged that off. IBM is nothing but a software company now, and IMO, not a very good one.
Is this how they hope to recoup the eroding revenue from servicing?
(it was also the first 4 door car I’d ever owned)