For several years now, some car companies have been experimenting with ideas drawn directly from video games.who Somewhere along the line, the idea was that if people were willing to pay for games, they would spend more money on the games they already bought. Then they might do the same for cars. It's a much more expensive and lucrative business..

For example, BMW We offer subscription services Where you can get heated seats for $18/month, or Paid to unlock adaptive cruise control. Tesla is Expensive ($99-$199a Moon!) Subscription Service Volkswagen, Toyota and GM are also experimenting with similar subscription-based unlocks and features.

But this week's headline is the most outrageous example since Tesla locked battery range behind a paywall. Mercedes says, "Increased acceleration,” cost a dollar200 yen per year, at the time of purchase, "EQ vehicle acceleration can be improved by 0.8 to 1.0 seconds."

Cars have always had expensive add-ons that were pillars of the whole business model and were previously tangible purchases. If you paid for bigger wheels, you got bigger wheels.farewell to some over a thousand For leather seats, you get fancy leather seats.

But what's happening with these car subscription services is far more ominous. you really don't get anything Instead, thanks to advances in operating systems and communications found in modern automobiles, what you're buying is a vehicle with certain features restricted or locked, which you can enable remotely.

This is the same debate video games went through over a decade ago, and we collectively shrugged. That's when people found out that the DLC they were looking to buy was already included on the disc they purchased. Same story here. The motors in these Mercedes cars can run fast all the time, and locking certain elements of performance digitally behind his paywall is absolutely infuriating.

One of the common factors in these worst examples is that they're limited to expensive luxury cars and target rich people who probably don't mind spending a few extra dollars a month. When you drop $100,000 or more by car. The danger, of course, is that if the rich start buying this stuff, When it comes to a successful business model, it doesn't It's been a long time since I started seeing that in a Toyota Corolla... ah.Great.