Memes

Even Toyota is doing this now. They locked features like the digital tire pressure gauge behind a paywall on their app.

You might not have a choice if they all decide to do it. Companies are actually kinda good at that kind of collective actions sometimes.

We said that when the Oblivion horse armor released. And look where we are now.

At some point basically everyone will do it and marketing will fo the rest.

Neither would I, but the majority of these cars are going into corporate fleets. I'll have one at the end of the year. I assume corporate isn't going to pay for the optionals so I'll be stuck with a crippled car through no choice of my own.

Is money just irl in game currency?

Well.. Plenty of cars are actually becoming a rideable PC where “ride” is just an option too. This is one of this things where I can’t decide, is it more sad, scary or stupid.

And lose all warranty? Nah rather buy a car from someone else

I like the enthusiasm, but I have no idea how a community driven project would interface with the appropriate regulatory boards to perform the safety tests to make such a vehicle street legal.

Even if we got a prototype through that, the organization would then have to take on the burden of ensuring every build lived up to the prototype, and that would almost definitely go against the spirit of being community driven.

I mean, there are car builder kits.

The DIY urban transportation community has settled on an even more portable solution called the "e-bike." It can tow a trailer of cargo or small kids, and makes city parking much easier.

India will have a real problem in a couple of decades... Or they will make their own models with unlimited lifetime honks.

BMW and Mercedes are in a competition to make the ugliest and most user unfriendly cars on the market.

Or just don't buy a car that needs to connect to the internet. This is beyond stupid

It is the right decision for some mass transportation, but you can't make cars obsolete with public transportation. Especially outside major cities.

Although I enthusiastically agree, that's a little off-topic to be the takeaway from this particular kind of article.

In this case, the issue to be outraged about is that the corporations are violating our property rights in order to engage in illegal rentiership. As owners, we have the right to modify our own property, including to unlock the full potential of the physical machine, and no amount of DRM or the DMCA anti-circumvention clause should be allowed to change that!

That doesn't need any kind of new "right to repair" or anything either; it is inherent to the definitions of what "property" and "ownership" are! I mean sure, we should impose requirements for products to be better designed for repairability and have documentation and spare parts available, but lots of people seem to think what Mecedes etc. are doing is currently within their rights, and that's just crazy talk. These things aren't legitimate subscriptions; they're a protection racket! Trying to hold capabilities hostage that the device owner already paid for (by virtue of having bought the physical device) is literally criminal and company executives ought to be going to prison for it.

Anyway, to get back to addessing your comment: even if we do fix the zoning code to make cities walkable (which we definitely should do, by the way) and cars become a niche product that only rural people and folks who have to drive around as part of their job have, it still doesn't fix this issue because (a) it's important to protect the rights of owners even of niche products, and even more importantly (b) cars are hardly the only product category that manufacturers are trying to pull this shit in anyway.

TL;DR: stopping the erosion of ownership and fixing car dependency are orthogonal issues, this article is concerned with the former, and your suggestion only addresses the latter.

Public transportation FTW.

But here in the US that will literally never happen.