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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, it's mandatory to buy a 3-year subscription to be allowed to buy the car new. It's not required to maintain the subscription to use the car once you own it. This is equivalent to raising the MSRP by $1500 and including 3 years of a free OnStar subscription with every purchase. Viewed in that light, what's so bad about this?

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This is equivalent to raising the MSRP by $1500 and including 3 years of a free OnStar subscription with every purchase. Viewed in that light, what's so bad about this?

It's bad because it's duplicitous. GM advertises an SUV for $50k when it's really $51.5k.

IMO, mandatory costs (tax, regulatory, or otherwise) should always be included in the normal retail price (or fee if we're talking subscription services).

>GM advertises an SUV for $50k when it's really $51.5k.

... you haven't shopped for a car recently, have you?

Lol. Yeah, just some round numbers, not actual pricing.

I don't understand who's buying these new SUVs. I felt sick paying $42k for my Ridgeline and the Yukon and similar are >50% more expensive. Maybe I'm just frugal?

My point, which either was strongly-rejected or mis-perceived as snarky by readers, was more that manufacturer MSRPs for cars are certainly not now (nor have ever really been) anything more than initial anchoring points for price bargaining with dealerships, who are the actual sellers.

Pricing power is with the dealers right now and so you see large markups over MSRP for "market adjustment". Three years ago, pricing power was more with buyers and no-one in their right mind would pay MSRP.

First off, I don't think that's true. I bought a new GM car with on star and I wasn't required to get it. But they did turn it on by default, and it was completely useless. Never used it. Not once. I also asked if it had turn by turn directions with a map and was told, "yes". I ask them to prove it, and we go for a test drive and the map and directions don't work. When told this, the sales person assured me, it would work when I bought the car, because it just doesn't work because the system isn't active yet. All of this was bullshit. I wouldn't have spent the extra money for the screen and backup camera and all that from the dealer if it didn't have the turn by turn with a map. So basically, the free market isn't free, I couldn't know what I was buying, and I was duped by the dealer in a real free market way.

Second, even if true, I'm not sure it is legal? This kind of depends on FTC and anti trust law as well as contract terms. Did you know that onstar has curl in it? If you look in a GM manual, at the back they have all the licenses that contain all the licenses for free software they use. Who knows if they are actually following them. They could be running GPL for all we know and not sharing the code. That happens all the time, every day.

Third, even if it is legal, I'm not sure people will stand for that kind of hidden price increase on a car these days. Every consumer is getting squeezed. They will notice this, and all the other little inflation gotchas that the companies are doing to try to milk the US consumer a little harder. But it's proving that the consumer this time isn't going to do it. And getting shafted to do it for so long tends to lead to regulation, which is the second point again. When the consumer is squeezed, regulation is almost always missing.

From an economics perspective, they have the box in it tracking you the whole time if you buy it or not. So the cost of the box is really baked into the price of the car, not the subscription. If you turn off onstar they don't pull out the box or something. The box also has a sim card that is always active no matter what, so you can activate it again.

So in essence, you've already paid for it in terms of the actual real cost, and now you have to pay a lot more for what amounts to a cell phone that can call 911 itself. The subscription is twice as much as just a normal cell phone. Probably 20x what it honestly needs to be. It really should be included as a normal safety feature of every car. The ability to call 911 after an accident. Same for the ability for the cops to shut down a car remotely. If you think this doesn't happen or can't, you're wrong. It's done already. Cars have governors on the fuel injectors to keep their speed down, but not limit power. It's usually illegal to remove them, because that changes the HP, and usually requires retitling the car. Sometimes this means you get pushed into a different class of car based on the HP which means different taxes.

Now I believe that you should be able to modify your car how you want if you own it. It's yours. But we're heading into the car subscription model, where your car is basically going to cost you a dollar to turn it on soon just because we won't be able to stop it if all the car manufactures do it.

So if we're going with the subscription model, why can't we cancel the criminals subscriptions without needing to chase them down and run them off the road, causing unnecessary road deaths and police deaths?

Well, we just don't like it. Freedom, you know. But we're not free. We never really were. That's an illusion they give you, like a free lunch, where they charge you for the drinks.

disclaimer: I read just the top and the bottom of your note.

Merely saying "freedom" I think is the mistake.

We have very specific rights and corporations have very specific restrictions. Corporations profit by taking advantage of opportunities. That's kind of generally what power is all about.

And so I'd be far more comfortable saying that we have the freedom to not buy something that GM is selling.

So you're admitting you didn't read the whole thing but don't agree with me? I think that we do agree, I don't want to buy onstar either.

But people like to say freedom like - right to work, which makes it sound like this magical thing. What it really means is that you can get fired at any time, and get nothing. Which is really the right to get fired. It's kind of like the right to die, it's not really a "right" so to speak. It's just the default. If it were illegal to die, then who would you punish?

Look at the people that don't work under those laws. These are people with contracts for employment. Pro sports (NFL, NBA, etc), executives with golden parachutes, etc, etc. This is how Adam Neuman can be an idiot and run a company into the ground and then quit or get fired, then cash a billion dollar check on the way home while everyone else is stuck waiting for unemployment systems to be built so they can register for unemployment to hopefully maybe get some of the money that they are entitled to.

This is also unions, unions work under contracts. This united auto workers. Teachers, police, etc. All of these people are being ground up into powder. Union busting is living its best life.

IMHO it's a much better idea to read the entire post before replying. I did for you. If you have the time to reply you have the time to read?

It's mandatory tracking of your vehicle with remote disable. It's not just a walkie-talkie.

I daresay those features remain "active" even if you don't have an OnStar subscription active.

They absolutely do (source, I know there's a sim card in there, they never take it out, it phones home, etc). You get the onstar reports, and can activate it any time using the active sim card.

You can I think get into the box if you have tools, and pull out the sim though. I really want to hack that thing, so I can control the display! I'd love to be able to put linux on my car. And I deserve to. It's mine! I bought it! As long as it's still safe, why does it matter?

If I ran a fleet of work trucks I think that I'd want this if I could locate where my vehicles were. If it was a personal vehicle, I would not want it at all.

I’m adjusting my tinfoil hat as I type this, but can you even buy a recent non-commercial passenger vehicle without some data connection in hardware? Shoot, some even have WiFi hotspots now.

And for those that don’t, there’s probably one or more cell phones in the cab. Probably some open airdrops even. So many e-flys down.

The mandatory subscription doesn’t seem that shocking - that’s just a different flavor of hiding the total price. Wouldn’t be buying a car without that. (Should be.)

The hardware though, this mandatory subscription just puts it in bold. Plenty of makes and models have the (sort of) hardware by default, you can take or leave the subscription and associated benefits. Please take it of course, but that hardware connection is installed either way. In case you change your mind!

BMW is already trying to charge for warm butts. Gotta make that easy to toggle. Taking it to a shop for that “upgrade” is silly compared to OTA.

It’s all silly, and far worse.

No because it's a mandatory safety feature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall

The tracking is independent of the subscription, though. GM could always track vehicles with OnStar, whether or not the owner was paying for a subscription. And you can rip the OnStar module out of your vehicle and it will still work, even with the new mandatory subscription.

>This is equivalent to raising the MSRP by $1500 and including 3 years of a free OnStar subscription with every purchase. Viewed in that light, what's so bad about this?

And if I would like to save that $1500 by waiving the 3-year free subscription? Do I have that option?

No. But you didn't in the old days when it wasn't broken out as a separate line item either.

They used to run ads on TV about how OnStar promotes "safety".

I wanted to make a parody where a white collar criminal is rushing to the hydrofoil in a GM vehicle and the police use OnStar turn the vehicle off remotely in the name of "safety".

And in reality, the "safety" they give isn't really that safe. The real feature is the ability to call the cops if you are in the car by yourself and passed out. That's it. If you can hit the button yourself, you can probably find your phone. If you never need it, then you never need it. And it's overpriced and monthly subscription at its finest. If it were at cost, I would go for it, because it does increase safety. But for what they sell as safety, it's not worth it. It probably matters for <1% of people. But they shove it down everyone's throat.

I wanted to make a parody where a white collar criminal is rushing to the hydrofoil in a GM vehicle and the police use OnStar turn the vehicle off remotely in the name of "safety".

There's likely at least one dystopian sci-fi story with a similar event in its plot.

> This is equivalent to raising the MSRP by $1500 and including 3 years of a free OnStar subscription with every purchase. Viewed in that light, what's so bad about this?

For one, the latter is transparent about its pricing.

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