https://www.reviewgeek.com/111381/you-dont-really-ever-own-an-ev/
My anecdotal experience is that most Americans under 25 will welcome the subscription services. They don't want to own or maintain the car *at all*. The cell phone is the center of their world. Cars are appliances and driving is an inconvenience.
Sadly they have missed the fun of blasting round an empty, snowy carpark, or a field. I guess you can still hire quad bikes.
I guess no one would do that with a "new" car, and many people I see seems to buy on tick... so have new.
<deleted rant about buying everything new on tick />
>> on tick
That phrase was new to me; I had to look it up.
>> new to me.
Me too. Two peoples separated by a common language, as the saying goes.
>> snowy carpark, or a field
Or lake. I almost flipped the family car that way. Of course, as it looked bad, I was not at all bothered by the prospect that the car would flip, break the ice on impact and we would die. I was afraid that I would live and have to explain myself to my parents. Life has changed so much for me since then. Now I would would be freaking out about explaining it to my wife. It would violate the spirit, though not the letter, of our pre-nuptial agreement.
Said agreement has only one clause: "No sliding off into the abyss," which we have translated loosely as no dying while climbing. As Buckworks has heard in the live telling over Indian food if I'm not mistaken, Theresa came very very close to violating the spirit of that agreement, but happily is alive for me to chastise.
More seriously, in my teen years it was common for young males (and basically unheard of for young females) to buy a crappy old motorcycle and or car and then have to constantly be working on it. I hate working on my car, but I loved working on my first two vehicles, both motorcycles. I learned a lot about tools and just generally about fixing things that way. A lot of the younger people (early 30s, so 25 years younger than me) that I know are still very much in that mode and some are crack mechanics and some seem to be able to work on all kinds of equipment. It would be sad if the generation after them, so the ones who are 5-15 now, lost those basic skills in much the way that most of us have lost the skill of growing things.
My first car was an Austin-Healey 3000 BN7 ...an early version of the 3000 series, basically an AH 100-6 with a slightly updated body (the windshield no longer tilted). Mine had twin Solex carbs, which could be temperamental, but not the impossible-to-sync tri-carb configuration. We bought it very used, but it was mechanically sound. Still, having an early 60s english car meant you were going to work on it about as much as you drove it. Tuned for speed it only got 8 mpg, so I also had to work in order to feed it.
>>having an early 60s english car
Daniel Pinkwater has what he calls the Doctrine of Constant Suffering. His thesis is that everyone has a given amount of suffering in life and that you can fulfill your quota by owning a French car. That is why he drives a Peugeot.
Update: slight error in the above. Here's his explanation:
QuoteThat's the Theory of Displaced Misery, and it pertains specifically to French cars invariably becoming the focus of the maximum suffering and frustration an individual life can sustain. Many people have volunteered that the theory seems to apply to their lives, or did when they got a Peugeot.
https://www.pinkwater.com/dpq/post-713-19970101/
related:
GE_Appliances won't let me use convection roast on my new oven without connecting the oven to wifi.
https://twitter.com/drbarnard/status/1500145131894231046
>> wifi
Yup. All sorts of features on our new washer and dryer that require wifi and yet... a dozen connection attempts have failed. Could be the high latency satellite connection, which is often an issue for such things, but the app reviews have a lot of 1* reviews from people who can't connect.
75 Percent of Car Buyers Don't Want Features Locked Behind Subscriptions
https://www.thedrive.com/news/75-percent-of-car-buyers-dont-want-features-locked-behind-subscriptions
Wait, who exactly are the 25% who do want that?
Or more specifically, 92% believe that heated seats should be a one-time fee. So 8% think it's okay to pay a monthly fee to have your seats warm up? And BMW actually tried that?
What I would like to know is how people would like to pay for the same thing. In other words, saying "Do you want a heated seat subscription or not?" of course everyone will say "not."
But let's say that BMW decides that heated seats cost $500. They can get this money by adding $500 to the sticker price or charging $10/mo. So now if I ask people "Do you want to pay $500 up front or $10/mo for heated seats," that's a real question and a real answer. For someone like me who buys new or close-to-new cars and drives them to death, the $10/mo is a terrible deal. For someone who trades in the car every 3-4 years, it's a good deal, especially if they can pause the subscription every April to October or if they move to Texas or whatever.
So I find the "do you want subscriptions or not?" question a little unhelpful. It's like the "do you want more legroom in economy class on flights?" Everyone says yes, but when offered the chance to pay extra and get it, they choose the cheap seats. So the "yes" answer is really just, "I want something for free and the airlines should give it to me because I want it."