I own both Mercedes and Skoda (owned by VW) and I feel like both companies are headed in an extremely bad direction. The other day I saw that now Mercedes wants to charge me 200-300 USD/year for navigation and the ability to remotely lock your door.
The fact is they let you pay $100k for a car and then they behave like Facebook and other consumer platforms where you pay with your data and can buy add-ons.
You can't combine the two. In this case you paid for your car, so it's yours and they are hands-off unless you ask them for something. Also, the car should not randomly stop working after three years and ask you for extra money.
Unfortunately, I don't have any faith in Tesla either. While in front of innovation surely they are behind moral. If I were to buy a car today, I'm not sure where to look.
This is what happens when you dont control the machine you purchase. Stallman have warned much of this, but it is often on deaf ears, because consumers' behaviour don't change.
It’s more that our major markets are totally dominated by the standard pattern and there are no meaningful alternatives outside of bike and mass transit, which are not meaningful alternatives to vehicle ownership.
This is the most important point IMHO. There is no rational argument that someone is voluntarily signing up to some consumer-hostile behaviour by choosing to make a purchase if (a) every supplier in the market is playing the same game and (b) it is difficult to function as a normal member of society without buying that type of product from someone. Smartphones are a textbook example of this. For many people so are cars and TVs. General purpose computing is in danger of going the same way. Don't get me started on so-called smart homes.
Call it a failure of the free market and competition to provide effective alternatives. Call it a lack of oversight and regulation from governments that increasingly back businesses and economic figures over protecting their own people. It doesn't really matter. Until there is clear law that says selling products to people that will actively act against the interests of the purchaser must at least be prominently disclosed before purchase and probably in the more serious cases simply be banned by law the enshittification will continue because it makes the decision-makers a lot of money.
If anything our regulatory system has been hijacked by capital sponsors to reinforce the fundamental monopolies that operate our economy, and the secondary consequence is that if we do not continue to do it at this point, our economy will implode. So the government is not only captured but also has only one meaningful choice: to further reinforce the monopolistic control of the western economies in the hopes of continued “economic growth.”
Obviously this should be seen as a disaster scenario (and highly likely outcome) for a capitalist society.
I agree that there is a lot of regulatory capture within Western governments and this is bad. I respectfully disagree that we can't fix it.
In particular I reject the notion that any organisation or system is too big to fail. If any commercial organisation or cartel is reaching a position or scale where its failure would represent a significant threat to the economic stability or indeed the democratic government of its host nation(s) then it is imperative that it should be quickly - and if necessary brutally - brought to a position where either it no longer poses such a threat or it is effectively destroyed and space is created for alternatives (possibly derived from the original) that will better serve the society they are part of.
I think what will happen with that is "performance shops" will start jailbreaking cars. You can already unlock additional power in your ECU by going stage I, II or III with custom and reputable ECU modders and the car feels completely different. It's a matter of time before ECU devs add going around subscription limitations, I think.
ECU modifications are rare (most people don't care) and car manufacturers don't lose money on it. If money gets on the table, I'm 100% sure they'll sue the workshops like John Deere did. And given the lobby VW has in Europe they can also pass some extra laws to reinforce their case.
I don't know about that... There's a whole industry of performance parts that softly depend on ECU modifications. There's much less of an incentive to swap parts if your ECU doesn't keep up with the performance gains.
But you are absolutely right on the loss of money aspect.
Most "ECU tuning" are just minor config file changes. The map is sufficiently complex being an R^2 data, enough to justify it being a skill. Actual car-guy-firmware-hackers are ultra rare.
I was just going to say this. It has to have a CARB sticker. No CARB sticker, no pass. Passing a smog test in most US states typically uses on-board telemetry combined with a rear-wheel dyno. Most smog shops won't touch vehicles that lack OBD2 but still require smog tests every 2 years. Also, I'm unsure if smog shops still use an external NOx/CO probe like ye olde days or rely entirely on the vehicle to be non-VW "smog mode" honest.
That's a very CA viewpoint. I moved from CA to NC and as long as the onboard computer isn't throwing a code and your emissions stuff (appears to be) in place they don't care. I have two vehicles that are tuned and they pass emissions no problem. They can see this (different means per manufacturer, I think BMW throws an invalid checksum and Ford does it by key trigger count or something) but since the vehicles are still blowing clean it's fine.
We just had a few counties discontinue emissions checks and now only do safety checks up to 30 years past which they don't inspect at all.
Keep in mind the EPA is cracking down HARD on businesses that sell any kind of "tuning" or "delete" device, handing out fines in the millions of dollars and shutting down businesses.
It's all well and good to say "you can get away with it", but the businesses selling these products can't.
You're projecting California onto the entire country. Many states thad mandate 50-state compliance for new sales stop caring after and most of them only do a plug in test anyway. Many states don't test at all.
Vehicle mods exist in the same sort of patchwork of "illegal to various degrees but nobody cares" gray areas that weed does.
At the end of the day enforcement is capped by political will.
> You can already unlock additional power in your ECU by going stage I, II or III with custom and reputable ECU modders and the car feels completely different.
Yup, especially since that many cars artificially limited to "segment" the model into more models but are basically the exact same car. Some ECU modders, at least in the EU, also play it fully legit: they'll reprogram the ECU so that you've got more power and they'll help you with the paperwork for the DIV / insurance so that it's all legal.
EU is also quite involved by making sure that a car can’t simply be a car anymore but needs a lot of complex systems that may ore may not work as intended, like remote capabilities etc.
Looks like they're not all working that great: [1], [2]
I don't think all assistants are that bad in general, but I'm not sure that taking all capabilities and responsibilities (well that point is a bit of an open question with these systems) away from the driver is the right approach.
If you drive like a decent human being (and as required by law in most places), it can be quite safe already, adding complexity may actually cause issues. That some people don't drive that way shouldn't be the reason to force these systems on to everyone, better to do a good job in teaching driving (driving schools in my country are expensive, but otherwise mostly worthless except for the safety training which strangely enough is done after getting the license), etc.
It's all part of a plan. The EU is very busy setting up the equivalent of the chinese "social credit". It started with "ESG" rating by banks (where you're already attributed an ESG rating depending on which companies you invest your money in) and now it's likely they'll be moving forward with computing your yearly carbon emission to then decide if you can go on vacation or not and how far.
Don't underestimate the globalists' plan to control every single individual. They have an agenda "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" (World Economic Forum plan).
Lately the EU wants to establish a registry of every single possession of every single EU citizen, down to watches, jewelry and paintings. There are literally vids with members of the european parliament asking the EU commission "guarantees" that this new registry won't be used to then confiscate these goods.
Tracking every single car is part of the plan.
And, no, I'm not seeing things.
People should vote to GTFO of the EU and should vote for much smaller goverments because the only things awaiting citizen at the end of the road is misery.
The EU is heading at full speed towards a dystopian totalitarian supra-state.
I don't know about watches, jewellery or paintings, but if any one class of personal possession _should_ be subject to this kind of totalitarian control, it's cars.
They literally cause more harm to non-participating bystanders than cigarette smoking, with even less ability to opt out. (For those of you aged under 35 - non-smoking bars, restaurants and public spaces used to be a rarity in Europe).
And why? Because we somehow ended up in a situation where we use the same piece of equipment to drop our kids at school 1km away as we do for ten-hour, 1000km inter-city journeys with two weeks' worth of luggage. They're vastly OP for most of what people use them for, but it feels necessary because everyone else has one - we end up obligated to carry around big, heavy, impact-protected vehicles to protect us from all the other big, heavy impact-protected vehicles.
Being in the EU is literally the best thing that has ever happened to my country, and it continues being an incredible benefit to everyone here. The suggestion that we would be better off out of the EU is actually insane.
>>And, no, I'm not seeing things.
Fantastic, that means it should be trivial to provide sources for everything you've said.
Wow, someone has been reading too much Nationalistic propaganda.
There’s no need to talk about hypotheticals here, let’s look at a country that actually left the EU. The UK so far is worse off financially, has worse trade deals and literally no better “sovereignty” nor privacy since leaving the EU.
The real totalitarians are the national governments who claim they should operate without oversight and then blame everything on foreigners.
re: EU central registry of assets, here is a Bloomberg Law piece from July 2024, detailing the chairman of the EU parliament's tax subcommittee's desire to get a "European registry of assets". it seems fairly straight forward.
i'm afraid ChatGPT was wrong about the asset registry. the EU parliament's tax subcommittee most definitely does want such a registry.
here [1] is a feasibility study released by the EU in 2024 re: "Feasibility study for a European asset registry in the context of the fight against money laundering and tax evasion".
There are already national registries of land, residential/commercial buildings and most types of vehicle. Business ownership and shareholding is also a matter of public record in most territories.
And while there may not be a national requirement for registries of other classes of high-value financial asset, you can bet the banks know, and above a certain size, $100k or so, I can't see the down-side relative to what's already legally mandated. (By all means argue for "total privacy", but this is not what the law has decided on in most places - that ship sailed long ago.)
Ignore the best car for self inflicted reasons, then get upset for not finding anything else. Where was your moral compass when you bought merc (or bmv or whatever else) when they were shoving basic necessities in higher trim packages to rip off people for years?
Refuse to sign any agreements about data collection (even for rental cars!), read the small print, if you are a EU citizen, send them GDPR Data Subject and then Data Deletion requests according to Article 17!
https://noyb.eu/en/your-right-erasure-article-17#:~:text=Wha....
I think they might have been only saying that Skoda is owned by VW? The fact that the referred to "both companies" after that made me assume that, although I know next to nothing about cars (and hadn't even heard of Skoda before, but maybe it's not as well known to Americans like me).
The fact is they let you pay $100k for a car and then they behave like Facebook and other consumer platforms where you pay with your data and can buy add-ons.
You can't combine the two. In this case you paid for your car, so it's yours and they are hands-off unless you ask them for something. Also, the car should not randomly stop working after three years and ask you for extra money.
Unfortunately, I don't have any faith in Tesla either. While in front of innovation surely they are behind moral. If I were to buy a car today, I'm not sure where to look.