Quote Originally Posted by Sharkie View Post
Agreed, if the hardware is already there, you as the owner paid for it. Enabling it via coding is at your discretion then.
I do expect that cars might just come with a licence agreement in the future rather than a straight-up purchase contract which potentially changes that concept... but it's definitely getting into a space we older people just aren't used to.

I can understand if we weren't actually buying but renting a car and you were paying for the features that you actually use. Maybe that's the way of the future, but it's a hell of a different model to what we are used to. Would car makers want everyone on a Car as a Service model where they pay all maintenance and you just pay per day/month/year?? Probably. A few have tried but I don' think there has been so much take up since it's a logistic nightmare and for everyone else there is leasing.


Quote Originally Posted by Sharkie View Post
To them it is still a win as only a very small % of people actually bother to do so.
It's fair to say they don't want you to do this and if there were significant features up for grabs and a 3rd party was selling a tool to unlock stuff I reckon they would jump on that *very* quickly. Today there isn't that much to unlock and as you say there isn't a huge part of the user base accessing it.

Imagine a world where they make a single Golf in a 2.0T and you pay for difference performance levels and features providing a future upgrade path to you or subsequent owners. It could make production lines similar and provide future upsells (or subscription pricing for upgrades). Strange and different to now but with electric vehicles this starts to look more viable.