Man, never thought I’d see the day that after market car crackz become an industry.
And can a car your rooted pass periodic inspection?
keep original backup, restore, restore new backup afterwards.
😎
Hire a third party to do your tune-ups, specificly one that is jailbreak and hack friendly.
Soon, coming to a piracy site near you: [RZR] BMW i3 crack - Full (Heated seats + suspension + AC unlock + headlight fixes)1.05b.rar
:))))) Amen!
carwarez, websites that look like they came from the matrix with magnet links and mega links.
Wouldn’t mind those sweet tunes coming back though.
We’ve come full circle to downloading and running things with titles like:
“BMWaReZ_UnSUSSer+HeetSeeter-v4.20.69.appimage”
If I were a BMW customer, I’d be suspending my purchase of their rip-off vehicles.
If I own the car it’s my hardware to use. If I don’t own that suspension then someone needs to collect their property from my car.
FUCK these out of control capitalists jesus christ.
Should be a nottheonion article
We need a FOSS car…
In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.
Otherwise, you’re just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?
What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they’re regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all…
We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.
So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.
Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.
This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).
It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.
Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.
This is a side effect of deregulation of both corporations and the stock market. I think that we’re going to see the pendulum swing towards more regulation and consumer-friendly policies here in the US. I don’t see that lasting for the long-term, though. There are too many vulnerabilities in the political system that allow asshole billionaires to manipulate it.
it’s not the system that is the problem, it’s the lack of class consciousness, in America the rich have it, but not the working class
I didn’t wake up this morning with the knowledge that I’m about to move to Pennsylvania and convert to being Amish.
Active suspension is software, just like Photoshop is. You need to pay subscription fee for Photoshop now, and BMW wants a subscription fee for their active suspension software too. Rent seeking and Enshittification.
At least with Photoshop (as bad as the model is), at least they are actually running the software and storing and backing up the associated data for it.
With the car, it’s all local to the car without BMW having to incur any expense for that functionality to keep going.
Except that you have to have special way more expensive shocks to have adaptive suspension compared to fixed. It’s like being sold an I3 CPU for the price of an I9 cpu while being told you can pay a subscription to upgrade to the full performance
I feel like in this case it’s more like everyone gets sold i9 hardware, but can choose to pay the i3 price for it with locked out features, then decide later to pay the subscription to unlock the i7 or i9 performance. It has advantages for the manufacturer in that there are fewer options to account for at build time and additional revenue later on. I still think it’s a terrible model that should be summarily rejected by customers, but I see why they are trying it.
Yeah they’re totally not charging you for the expensive suspension they’re installing in your car in the hopes that you’ll pay a subscription to use it. 100% not included in the price, clearly no one would ever do that
Nobody is giving away i9 hardware at i3 prices otherwise everyone would buy the cheapest model and part it out for massive profit.
Btw, Intel has tried this practice before, and I believe still is doing it for some Xeons.
Intel is a unique name with unique products globally, who the fuck is BMW globally?
That’s not an excuse for Intel to be shady…
And BMW is one of the most valuable car brands out there. I don’t get why you’re pretending that BMW is some unknown entity. Unfortunately, many people will swallow BMW’s bullshit.
Id probably be angrier if this was some company making econoboxes, but if enshitification wants to target the cars of the rich, fuckin’ go for it.
The people driving those cars are probably closer to you than to the BMW CEO. They’re the same price as what trucks sell for these days and at some point they’ll reach the second-hand market and their price comes down quick.
True. I just bought a 1-year-old 330i, and it’s less than my wife’s Kia SUV (We live in Michigan, have three kids and two dogs, so it makes sense for us to have one big bus that can go off-road, else we’d have something smaller and electric). The BMW also costs far less than a pickup truck of the same age and mileage. US manufacturers have been transitioning out of the business of making sedans for years, because they’re not popular here. It is just a sea of SUVs and pickup trucks.
I do have a subscription to all kinds of “connected car” crap for the first year, but I’m going to turn all of that junk off when I make some other modifications later this year. I think the subscription is actually pretty cheap, but I just don’t want a bunch of spyware reporting back my location and speed.
Yeah, but they’re idiots
Well done BMW. Anything that leads to more people cycling instead of driving is a good thing in my book.
Sorry, your bicycle’s gear selector is locked into a single gear until you pay your subscription for the other gears.
People won’t switch from driving to cycling over this. They’ll just pick one of the several dozen other car manufacturers.
I suspect most BMW owners won’t care too much. Like they’ll find it annoying but still buy/lease the car anyway.
What if the cycling option is a really REALLY good bike?
If the bike does the biking completely for me, has hvac, reclining seats, can do 65mph down the highway and can take care of my morning wood taking into account remaining travel time, I’d be interested. That indeed would be a really good bike.
until every manufacturer implements it
Nobody’s gonna abandon cars as a whole over this, the same they wouldn’t abandon bicycles as a whole over some other outrageously monetized luxury feature they could live without.
Fucking LOL’d at this. Genuinely not sure if this is satire.
BMW is always making headlines with this crap, are there any other brands doing this shit? I know Hyundai IONIQ has a free trial for you to be able to unlock your car and whatnot with an app, later they will do it subscription based.
Most manufacturers are doing this.
Most people don’t seem to care since they understand there are ongoing server and infrastructure costs.
There is no justification for “server and infrastructure” for a fucking car. No part of a car should require a single penny of server costs over the entire lifespan.
I don’t get what you mean.
The app is intended to remote start your vehicle when you’re out of range of the key fob. I’m not sure how you’d propose that function works without servers and infrastructure.
My car’s suspension should not need a server.
How else would they know that you’ve paid for it?
Not downvoting you, but what on earth would need a SQL server to use suspension? It would be far too slow for real-time applications, and this isn’t a rolls royce engine on a jet generating 1tb of data a second when all sensors are active and logging.
This is a mall-mobile that someone will probably total in a power center parking lot in Arizona.
Now, I can “kinda” see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.
As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I’ve visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it’s quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.
So, there’s probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn’t be worthwhile.
However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it’s possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.
What I don’t like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I’d much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.
So I think my point is, the argument “the hardware is there anyway” doesn’t really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.
They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.
How does any of this benefit the buyer?
Asking for a friend lol
Well, I would say it SHOULD bring overall prices down. If the cost to build the top of the line model comes down to say the same as the mid-range model AND more people are say buying up. It means that competition would push overall prices down.
But of course not, it benefits the companies most, and given the choice of lower prices or more profit, they’ll choose the profit every time.
If they go subscription only (because recurring revenue is the current business buzzword, so of course they will go subscription only) then overall cost for the life of the car will definitely be higher yet “feel” more affordable.
So long story short… They do it for their own benefit. So why would any self respecting paying customer care about any of these reasons?
Pretty much how it always works with business.
yes so why should end user care about any of it besides price?
You’re right that the idea has come from the mind boggling number of options in vehicles these days. The company I worked for recently had over a million different combinations, and making more physical parts standard fit saves them money.
However that saving is not passed on to the customer. The company pockets it all, and makes more money on top with the subscriptions.
I wish that someone sues when something breaks in the car that you didn’t opt in for.
And… yet better, they get sued when something breaks that is in connection with a paid service and someone suspects that it’s because they paid part caused it.
What ever happened to you buy a car and that’s it. No need for subscriptions to things like suspensions, steering wheels, running engines…. You know the things I bought.
And what happens when all the cars are like this? EAAS? (Enshittification As A Service)
They tried this with heated seats and no one wanted it, what made them think would we accept this?
German car makers have become such a joke in the last decade…
These cars already cost more than my life, how can they ask for more money.
Because people with no self respect will pay them.
Because the people who buy them have it and BMW can get more out of them. The real problem is that they’ll buy it, and other manufacturers will see “hey, it’s a successful model and additional revenue generation!”
In theory most subscription services provide additional content as time goes on. This only provides a capability that already exists on the car.
Scummy practices that should be outlawed, like retail stores raising prices just before a big sale so they can slap “80% off!” on their stuff.
EU is at least trying to do something about that. As of last year stores are required to display the cheapest price they’ve had for an item in the past three months when they have something on sale. Not all stores comply, and of course they try to get around these by the usual shenanigans, like basically the same product being available from the manufacturer with two slightly different item codes.
