You forgot this little point.
You own a non-exclusive, intransferable licence to use and operate said car.
Yes, you paid for it. But it’s not really yours. You own its body. Someone else still owns its spirit. And they want a rent for you to be able to touch the spirit.
Why would they do that?
Obviously, becaude that shit flies. Why not do it? Money is money. And companies exist for it. Fuck morality. Fuck common sense. They only care about the little green lines.
Customer satisfaction?
Not even an afterthought.
In a sane world, everyone would think like you. I do, for one.
The problem is everyone else who doesn’t. They’ll put up with it, accept the thinly-veiled excuses, and the company will see "wow, we can do that now? Gee, these people are stoopid. Let’s see how far we can take it.
Honestly, I see where they’re coming from. Not that I support it. But it is a rational decision on their part.
In a sane world, the smart employee who came up with this would be fired promptly, because if the company were to carry this shit out, they’d get so much bad press it’d take over a decade to recover.
But alas, we don’t live in a sane world and clearly enough consumers are either idiots or ignorant for this shit to fly.
Dagnet@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Did you know that actually happens with jet engines for a long time now? Companies lease jet engines and they have licenses for a certain number of engines in different max outputs, they can even transfer between them like, one 100% engine got damaged so they they transfer the 100% license to an 80% engine while it is in maintenence (all numbers are made up but the idea is the same).
But yeah, shit is fucked.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
That kind of makes sense in context, since for leasing it’s not their hardware and they’re probably doing accounting based on the amortized costs of using them
But no I did not know that and it is pretty cool
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Even the transmissions in school buses have worked this way for more than two decades now. The Allison 2500-series is built with 6 gears (plus one reverse) but usually 6th gear is disabled in the software as users buy the 5-gear variant. The 6-gear variant is more expensive and 5-gear buyers can upgrade to that down the road if they want to - or you can crack it with widely-available software, something that many people in the skoolie community take advantage of.
At least 6th gear isn’t a subscription service … yet.
toddestan@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Considering that the purpose of that 6th gear would be to lower the fuel consumption, that means we have a bunch of buses running around burning more fuel and polluting more all in the name of more profits.
At least school buses spend a lot of time driving around at relatively low speeds so the lack of the extra gear probably has little real-world effect for most buses, but still…
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 5 days ago
An even worse factor is that EPA regulations governing diesel engine emissions specify allowed emissions in terms of horsepower-miles, which means that more powerful engines are allowed to emit more pollutants per mile. This has led to school buses becoming over-engined compared to what they used to be a few decades ago. This is good for lead-footed bus drivers and the people behind the buses (I guess), but not so good for the air. And of course EPA diesel regulations specify nothing about greenhouse gas emissions.
At least school buses have the intrinsic efficiencies of mass-transportation behind them. If parents were driving all these kids to school instead, the net emissions would be vastly worse. Of course most of these kids could walk or bicycle instead …