Technology

Why is this bad in a nutshell.

A) The only way to control access to this feature is to lock down and phone home. If it doesn't phone home then when someone figures out a way around your present security its possible for someone to sell said features forever. Such DRM could hurt repeatability by accident or more likely on purpose.

B) There is no reason to fail open so even if BMW is still chugging when they stop taking your cars phone calls and retires those servers you get no more feature.

C) The amount spent over the lifespan of a car wherein people opt to take care of their valuable asset absolutely dwarfs the cost able to be extracted up front

D) This functionality opens the door to a hacker not just turning off your features but turning off your car. This includes state sponsored attackers and people who are just generally pissed off at the geopolitical actions of your country of origin. If you are in the US that is a lot of fucking people.

E) Product segmentation on average increases the amount you can extract per user. Allowing segmentation by features turn on or off in software by the month it allows far greater segmentation with no reasonable expectation that the baseline will be lower. This means the lowest end user of a model pays the same for even less. The median user pays somewhat more and the max user pays a LOT more.

F) This means wholly paid for used cars now come with a car payment to the manufacturer.

Now there are half a hundred people on the boards of these companies and 338M of us in the US. 449M in the EU. There is no reason to allow this misfeature to continue to be a thing in our markets. If automakers don't like those restrictions any one of them can opt to most of the most valuable markets in the world and find their fortunes exclusively in China while their competitors eat their former marketshare.