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Comment by ProZsolt | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't mind it. I would be fair and square. You could have two options:

1. Buy a car as is: Pay your car upfront. No updates after purchase

2. VaaS: No upfront cost. Constant updates, monthly payment.

This current situation why I hate IoT devices. You pay upfront and hope they still provide the service after n years. It makes no sense for me, why would somebody provide a service without an ongoing revenue.

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You can already have that right now. It's called leasing. After a few years you give the car back and get a new one.

I recall a documentary where they had a bunch of Electric vehicles out on lease. The company wanted to take all the vehicles back off the market so they went to all the owners to take the cars away.

The owners liked the vehicles so much they offered to buy them outright from the company so they could at least keep the cars they liked.

They raised the few million needed to pay off everyone's lease.

Company refused and took all the cars away anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

The company is General Motors and the vehicle the EV1.

I remember that story. Basically GM ran a little EV business for a while, then cancelled the project. Then were attacked and hated far more than, say, everyone else in the world who never bothered making EV's in the first place. Always seemed warped to me.

#1 would be wonderful except that by offering #2, the vehicle will ship unfinished with the only tested functionality being the update mechanism.

Funny, but I don't talk about the same manufacturer. Think like the cloud providers: #1 Buy a server from Dell #2 launch an AWS EC2 instance.

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