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Comment by pythonaut_16 | Hacker News Reader

A rental car would at least make sense though. You're already paying a cost for temporary access to the car, adding on extra features doesn't seem outrageous.

It could improve availability of those features because a rental company could order a fleet with those features on all cars in their fleet and then customers who want it would be able to pay the surcharge, instead of being constrained by the portion of the fleet with those features installed.

Of course it would likely just be used as a way to increase rental car prices.

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Why don't they increase those rental prices anyway?

A company will aim to charge the most it can to its customers.

Customers will pay more if they think they're getting more in return.

If they can increase the rental prices without extra features, then they can charge even more for extra features.

Ultimately it comes down to the business's own calculus of costs, prices, and demand.

So it comes down to the customers not having the knowlege of what they are getting.

Sell something without the extra costs and will people pay more? In the housing sector in the UK that's certainly not the case -- people didn't value freehold over leasehold until lots of media coverage, despite the information being right there for all to see.

In a situation where there's a monopoly/cartel, the consumer that actually looks at the total costs and benefits can lose out because there aren't enough knowlegable customers to make an old fashioned business viable, but in industries with low barriers to entry and low network effects it's not a problem.

I honestly don't understand what you're getting at.

In the above comment you seemed to suggest that companies would already be charging more for rental cars if they could.

So I pointed out that consumers might be willing to pay more for a rental in return for a higher perceived value in the form of extra features being enabled.

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