Image: Mercedes
We talk quite a bit about the electric vehicle revolution, when a significant part of this revolution lies in rethinking what a vehicle is all about, when in some vehicles you can wake up one morning and discover that you have received a software update that allows your vehicle to do something it didn’t know how to do last night. But along with this advantage, there is also a disadvantage, when manufacturers lock some of the vehicle’s capabilities behind a payment wall. This is exactly what Mercedes did with its EQ EQE and EQS.
So what if you bought it for more than a million shekels?
The EQS is the electric model of Mercedes’ S series, which competes with the prestigious and expensive Model S (despite the significant price differences). It comes with very impressive capabilities such as a declared range of up to 700 kilometers, a huge screen that consists of 3 different displays, a chair with a massage function and a sound system with 15 speakers. In short, there is no shortage of reasons to drool over this thing.
With a price tag ranging from NIS 890,000 to NIS 1,390,000, you would expect it to come with everything including everything, but Mercedes will soon offer an annual subscription service called Acceleration Increase, which will allow you to shave another 0.8 seconds off the acceleration speed of the EQS: from 0 to 100 in 4.3 seconds.
Image: Mercedes
In exchange for shaving less than a second, Mercedes will be happy to shave its customers another $100 a month or $1,200 a year, when the new capabilities do not require them to come to the garage for any conversion, but are simply locked behind a pay wall, and are already limited from the factory. That is, the vehicle can always reach these figures, but Mercedes simply limited it software.
Mercedes is of course not the first to make a move to lock the vehicle’s capabilities behind a paywall and payment models: BMW wanted to charge $18 per month for a subscription that would allow users to activate the heated seats that were pre-installed in their vehicles; It also wanted to charge $80 a year just to let them connect to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Tesla, which introduced the concept of updates to mainstream vehicles, locks behind a paywall its autonomous driving capabilities, but also capabilities such as autonomous parking and switching between lanes while using cruise control.
Why base income on one-time purchases?
The car companies discovered what the technology companies already discovered about a decade ago, that instead of basing their revenues on one-time purchases from the customers, they can charge them fixed amounts every month or every year in the form of a subscription, and even play with the prices of these subscriptions as needed, and continue to receive revenue Even vehicles that have been on the road for years. In cases where these are completely new features that require development – yes, but for features that have apparently already arrived from the factory and are locked behind a paywall – a little less cool. Either way, just like the technology companies, here too you are locked in a closed garden and an ecosystem that doesn’t leave you too many options.