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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

> The company is confident that this strategic approach to software and hardware development will be the basis for lifetime revenues as well as additional contributions. Already in 2022, Mercedes-Benz generated more than 1 billion euro in software-enabled revenues with products and services such as navigation, Live Traffic or online map updates.

Get ready to pay a monthly subscription to use features that come stock on your car.

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What's the legality of hacking these things, assuming you own the car?

For example, BMW charges $18/mo to turn on heated seats you already own. Am I legally allowed to hack their software to enable heated seats w/o paying? How about installing a wire and switch and running them manually?

Well, depends on how much do you want a 5000-15.000$ warranty repair on your 80.000$+ vehicle to be rejected because you messed around with it.

It's not about difficulty of hacking, but with just how easy it is to put in DRM measures that will make sure that official repair shops will reject the repairs (and unofficial ones are really struggling due to lack of access to DRMed service tools necessary for new modules).

Of course you are, otherwise jailbreaking would be a crime.

All it needs to do is support CarPlay. Honestly car manufacturers should just let Apple do the whole car takeover. I’ve not met a stock system I liked. I’d rather it be powered by my phone.

I added a $200 CarPlay radio to our old Honda and it blows away every factory nav unit for usability (and sounds adequate). At this point, I’m only buying a car that has, or can easily have added, wireless CarPlay.

I like the BMW and the Tesla ones. I also heard good things about the Polestar Android.

The current OS on the Mercedes looks very laggy and not very user friendly, but if they fixed these major issues it could be quite nice. The high end Mercedes has a huge oled dashboard, it’s not something Apple CarPlay supports.

Tesla's is fairly good, but the way they handle text messages leaves me really wishing I could just have CarPlay. I may install a third-party screen somewhere so I can have it back.

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