This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it’s not the only way to buy the thing.
It’s available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it’s a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.
That is bullshit. If they want to lower the price by renting it out, they could perfectly well licencese local dealers to rent it out, who can go after the customer in the same way, like they could for people who rented vehicles and didnt pay/return them.
The subscription based model instead proves that the production costs cannot be that high, that in case of a run out subscription, they’d rather lose the product.
Also the development costs of the subscription and the technical equipment to validate subscriptions, including running the servers etc. are a significant cost factor, without which they could lower the price of the product.
Thanks for the context but
I feel like price for the one time purchase is set deliberately high because they want people to actually pay for the subscription instead. If their goal really was to make their products more accessible, just allow people to pay in installments and take some recurring interest fees for the financing.
And, in any case, the product should work no matter whether I’m late with the monthly fee or not. That’s just bullshit.
Also, do you need a persistent internet connection at all times so it can check if you’re subscribed at any moment it may need to in case of a crash? In a fast-moving vehicle? What an awful idea.
Why would you want computerized airbags? I don’t trust the software to not have bugs
Uhhh… Every single airbag is computerized. There is always some software involved in the evaluation of the acceleration data.
And noone trusts the software to not have bugs. That’s why testing exists on many development levels.
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is acceleration >threshold: toggle airbag) is a much easier and reliabel process than:
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is there an internet connection? is the subscription verified? is acceleration > threshold: toggle airbag)
