Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f
athairmor@lemmy.world 6 hours agoOf course it is possible that everyone pays for the hardware anyhow but it is not necessarily the case.
It is necessarily the case. No company incurs the cost of making something, delivers it and then just hopes that someone pays for it. You literally can’t do business that way.
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Of course you can do business that way. If the heating costs $x, and half the customers pay for it but $5x is charged then that is a profit.
The alternative would be to make two sets of cars (with and without heating). Or four sets of cars if another similar optional feature is shipped like this. Or 8 permutations if there are the features etc
It can certainly be cheaper to install them by default even if not all customers pay to enable them.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
Two sets of seats you mean. The car is the same. These days they don’t even have to blank out the buttons because it’s a touch screen anyway.
I already had heated + ventilated seats with the optional multi-contour (air based) cushions, but without the memory package, so they weren’t fully electric. Each of these things was an option, and there were more that I didn’t have that I probably didn’t know. Somehow they made a profit off the car. I also had the four zone climate control as opposed to the two zone, which was also an option over the manual air conditioning.
This was a 2003 car. No subscription, you just paid for the options you wanted.
In 2025 I would expect heated seats to be standard in any car more expensive than the very base model Dacia. Super simple tech, very easy to make, and pretty much a necessity in some areas of the world, particularly where I live.
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Two sets of cars, not seats.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Uhh… You do realise that you can choose options when you order the car, right? There are enough options on some cars that if you wanted to stock every combo, you’d need billions of cars.