Some don’t sell them as a feature immediately. I think Toyota has an 3-10 year ‘free trial’ for some of their services. So one day your decade old car will just behave differently unless you start paying for the subscription.

Crap like this makes me want nothing to do with service connected vehicles at all. I don’t want to have to dig into all the software policies and durations for every brand I might be interested in a model of. You absolutely can’t trust what a salesman says at the dealer. I’ve shown them in writing that what they just told me was a flat out lie on multiple occasions.

The vehicles in my garage are currently 10-57 years old. People replace vehicles far too frequently.

Politics aside it would have done significantly better if the pricing they had during its announcement event was anything close to the pricing it had at release. They announced it at $39.9k, $49.9k, and $69.9k for the RWD, AWD, and Cyberbeast. The RWD didn’t really ever happen, at least not as announced. They did release a RWD but it was different and much more expensive. They pulled it from market after ~5 months. The AWD and Cyberbeast actually released at $69.9k and $99.9k. Needless to say many people cancelled their preorders.

There’s a reason you don’t do things like that…

Apparently nobody in that software team has heard about Knight Capital. They reused a flag and that coupled with a deployment failure that only lasted ~45 minutes caused an over 400 million dollar loss nearly bankrupting the entire company. Ultimately they ended up combining with another company.

The immediate cause of the incident was a deployment failure that left one of eight servers running outdated code, creating an inconsistency in how the system interpreted incoming instructions. The new software reused a flag associated with a legacy function known as “Power Peg,” which had been disabled but not removed from the codebase, and on the unpatched server this flag activated obsolete logic that continuously generated child orders in response to parent orders that the system did not correctly recognize as already filled.

More details

I will already tell you that’s happening. Own a Ford and the amount of QR codes that are on all parts of that vehicle is truly astonishing. I know Ford published a huge pdf of things to check for to cut down on warranty fraud. It’s absolutely checking certain parts against the build data to see if they’ve been swapped since the vehicle was built.

It’s not all nefarious. Keeping tabs on all the parts in each vehicle can help them scope recalls to certain batches as above or redesign parts that keep failing before their lifetime expectancy(usually because it’s inside warranty and costs them money).

Sometimes it’s just bad parts from a supplier that only affects a tiny amount of vehicles sold.

I had a motorcycle with a front tire recall. I actually had to take it to the dealer for them to check the tire itself. They had two different manufacturing batches of the tires in the motorcycle manufacturing facility at the same time. One batch was bad. They knew the VIN’s of the bikes that could be affected but had no way of knowing which batch of tire went on what VINs. They had to send recall notices to the whole range and check it out individually knowing only about half of the VINs notified actually had the problem. Plenty of bikes made before and after the bad tire batch that weren’t in scope of the recall.

I still own vehicles without the green light. That started being a thing about the time they made gauge clusters giant lcd screens that were lit up at all times of day. If you don’t have your headlights on in my car then you can’t tell how fast you’re going since the gauges aren’t lit up at all. Makes it super obvious when your lights aren’t on…cause you actually have to turn them on in that car. Which leads into my next thing.

My pet peeve is people driving around with only the daytime running lights on. They have weak headlights and absolutely no tail lights. I run into at least one car like this nearly every time I drive at night. I found one possible cause for it. Any time you take your car in for service they usually turn off the auto headlights so it’s not draining the battery in the shop but they rarely turn them back on.