depends how much penetrating shrapnel we want
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(Endgadget excerpt) Boeing isn’t being made by regulators to make any of the optional features available, and neither are required by the Federal Aviation Administration.
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i’m a big believer in the power of government and policy… till i’m not. 
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Burroughs too, with a couple of machines in the 1950ies/1960ies. Buy the upgrade, technician swings by, removes a card, machine runs faster.
(There are stories that they didn’t sell that many of those upgrades because the BOFHs caught on pretty quickly. Remove card for day-to-day operation, make sure the card is back in its slot when the technician is due.)
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Kundenverarschungsservice more like.
Or Kundenverarschungsdienstleistung if you’re not into the whole Neudeutsch thing.
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Yeah, that’s what it is, but I wanted to stay true to the original question.
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These things are nuts and bad idea and should just be illegal, my mate has 4 year old audi A6 that had a very nice dash that had google maps on it, the car came with a 3 year subscription when that ran out, the nice map display stopped working and pulling the maps from google, The cost for a new 3 year subscription was £300 (I can not remember the exact price but it was not cheap), the only issue was that google thought his 3 year old car was to old to run google maps and so was no longer supporting cars of that age after next year, so the warning was you can buy a 3 year sub but it will only work for 1 year!
If your cars connectivity is classed as old out data and unsupported on brand like audi for a 50k car by the time its 4, how long is the heated seat web site going to work for on BMW or on any car by the time they hit the 2nd hand market will any online features be supported?
I give it 5 mins before all these things are jail broken by a guy down the pub. If pub still exists in 5 years time…
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All pubs will be Wetherspoons by then.
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I dont they just announced a 35 million loss, But the cost of pint in a pub in some places is now prity much what most people earn and hour, pubs have priced them self out the market, showing my age, when i where a lad pint was a quid and i made £7 working in shell at uni, but in the last 20 years a pint in a city pub is now more like a 5iver, but my wages have not gone up by the same %.
Go I went to a gig in the 02 in London an pint was £7.13 and redbull and vodka was £6.30.
This was the entire IBM business model for most of their history. They didn’t make money selling computers, they made money selling service contracts.
It’s why they fumbled the transition to personal computers so badly. They didn’t understand how to operate in a market where you sold a product and that was it.
Everything old is new again.
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In case anyone is reacting to this, it’s actually been standard practice in many cars for a long time. Many people want vroom vroom noises in their car, but car soundproofing is so good now that you can’t hear much of any exhaust sound in the car. So they pipe it into the stereo via microphones, and do a little tuning to make it sound in line with their brand.
Exhaust note tuning for branding is a very old practice as well, and doing it digitally now is frankly a lot easier for them.
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If they could get rid of the actual tuned fart can exhausts, that’d be great! (True, a lot of those are aftermarket for people who want their car to sound faster.)
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Oof, those are the worst. I’ve never heard an aftermarket exhaust that doesn’t sound terrible, frankly. OEMs spend millions of dollars doing that properly, and it shows.
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The seat heater thing can probably be cracked easily by the aftermarket. After all, if they can sell you a dongle that completely remaps the engine to get another 100-500 horsepower out of it, certainly they can program a dongle that fakes a “seat heater OK” signal.
EVs should really take this to the next level and make it programmable. “What do I want the car to sound like today? Hmmm. How about a 1971 Porsche 911 SC?”
Borla makes some really good ones - just a bit louder than stock but still smooth. Not a great option for luxury cars but for a Subaru or Mitsubishi the results are nice.
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That was my first thought as well. This will be cracked in 18 seconds. If the hardware is installed, people will find a workaround to enable it. It’s been happening since the beginning of all products trying to do this. I have a Rigol oscilloscope that can have the frequency range doubled with a click in a hidden service menu. Didn’t take the community long to find that one.
In fact they have! Mainly in Japan right now, but there are EVs that let you upload custom sounds. I think primarily for the pedestrian warning beep (needed in parking lots because EVs are so quiet, people will walk right in front of you and get hit). Not sure if any are doing full car sounds yet, but they definitely will. Then, because late stage capitalism ruins everything, those sounds will become walled garden DRM things you have to buy from the Mercedes App Store or whatever.
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