New Jersey Bill Could Ban In-Car Subscriptions

So they're going to ban satellite radio?

 

I wouldn't be surprised if car manufacturers followed Subaru and Kia with respect to 'right to repair' in Massachusetts:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/02/23/subaru-right-to-repair-fight-cars

Eg, no subscriptions, and permanently disabled equipment, for cars in NJ.

 

No. The article says that the ban doesn’t include services that incur a cost to provider after delivery. So it doesn’t ban OnStar or Sirius. Other things like using your phone to unlock car would also not be covered as that requires the car to have cell service which someone needs to pay for. The target is BMW’s subscription for heated seats. Unknown which side of the law Tesla’s Full Self Driving would fall on.

 

Any accountants here, help a brother out… if one purchases a car and it is delivered with all these telematics features already enabled, wouldn’t adding previously-undisclosed user subscription fees or disabling the features after the sale contravene some SarbOx regulation or other?

 

Other companies ship disabled equipment that can be activated at the dealer or online. Audi Function on Demand is one.

My Porsche dealer wanted $2k to unlock CarPlay, but I had someone online do it for 1/10th the cost (about 20 minutes of work).

If they didn’t include deactivated CarPlay on all of the cars I would have been in a worse position. Hmm.

 

Yeah, that I get, but my question is whether they can extort more money out of us after the sale, if the cars are delivered with all the features as advertised, promoted, and sold, threatening to shut features off if we don’t pay (more)?

 

That was just a comment on the original post To your question, I haven’t got a clue!

 

Do you have an example?
As I understand it the cars are sold with x years of free premium subscription so the reason you got the feature was because they paid for your subscription for you for x time. If you choose not to renew then the feature stops working. At no point was the feature sold with the car and no mention made of needing a subscription, so I think they’re in the clear. Nothing got taken away.
However the bill seems to be targeting equipment in the car that cannot be prepaid for, eg you cannot pay for heated seats as a one off, only by subscription.
I presume Tesla Enhanced autopilot which is a available to buy outright at any time for $6k would be allowed as you pay it and get it forever, and perhaps because of this the fact they offer a $200 a month subscription as an alternative would be allowed?

 

CarPlay is an example. There are zero ongoing costs to the auto maker, but BMW thought they should charge an annual fee for it. The backlash from that was immense, however, and BMW was forced to backtrack. The SE comes with CarPlay, but I actually went through a one-week period where CarPlay was disabled in my SE due to a "backend issue" at MINI/BMW, which was eventually resolved and my CarPlay restored. But it shows that a non-subscription feature of my car is subject to tampering by remote software changes.

 

Zero costs except for all the software implementation and testing costs, upgrade development costs, and adjusting to new versions of CarPlay released by Apple. Other than that, it's totally free.

 

That is not relevant to existing functionality, speaking from my perspective as a software developer. I referred to ongoing costs. Once CarPlay works in a car, it works. Your points are for development of future features, which is a completely different from existing functionality. The CarPlay interface ties the vehicle infotainment system to the iPhone, once that works all of the changes come from Apple. CarPlay is evolving over time, but that doesn't mean anyone has to implement new functionality. The incentive to implement new functionality is to be competitive and offer customers what they expect. The cost of new functionality is along the same lines as changes to other parts of the car, such as the 2022 LCI changes to the SE.

A similar example is when MINI came out with their revamped user interface on the infotainment screen they didn't do anything to retrofit existing MINIs with it, even though the pre-2022 models are perfectly capable of running it.

 

All the features that were advertised, marketed, promoted, and sold to me. Heated seats is the oft-trotted-out example, but sure, where in my documentation or sales contract does it mention anything about possible future charges for, say, MINI Connected?

 

Fair points. I would assume if they started charging a monthly fee then you would get updates regularly.

 

I didn't realize how insane this has gotten, but I was watching this video and they talk about all the extra features you can pay for on the Mercedes EQS SUV. Start watching at the 5 minute point:

 

Neighbor (on another forum I call him MB Service Foreman Neighbor) told me EQS buyers are returning the car within the first month of ownership — a half dozen so far! — not because of subscriptions, but because the target demo for the car is the traditional S Class buyer… the least likely demo to be interested in doodads and gewgaws.

 

Wow that is absolutely nuts about all those subscriptions to purchase. Video says car starts at 158k Canadian which Google says is about 117k US. I guess they consider those customers ripe for squeezing more money from.

I have an Ioniq 5 and i'm practicing doing without bluelink to see what it will be like when the 3 year free subscriptions end. There are currently 3 packages in effect which are each $99 per year. Connected Care, Remote and Guidance. Remote commands to the car could possibly be worth $99, but not the other 2. I bet they will be more than $99 in 3 years. And i just hope there isn't some reason that you HAVE to buy them - like losing access to certain critical features or worse yet some legal language buried somewhere about warranty, service, etc.

This is one way how computerized cars really suck. You never own or have complete control over the entire thing. It's been happening for years and just getting worse.

 

I just found a semi detailed description of what Connected Care does. You need that to see status of the car and also manage charging remotely. I also see 7 features with the name "No_display_name". Looks like Hyundai is as shady as the worst of them, but a MINI is pretty nice to have.

 

Would you pay $1200 per year to make your SE faster?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price