Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

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It suggests that BMW must be in dire financial straits somehow, and I’ve been trying to decide why. Current theory is that it’s part ‘BMW needs to prop up their share price with a steroid injection of ads into their growth in growth of profit curve’, and part ‘BMW lost the evaporating upper middle class segment and is on the verge of collapse’

It’s such a look of desperation to add advertisements when they didn’t start out as a carnival-barker brand that it’s hard to continue trusting their vehicle manufacturing. Look at how poorly they rank in reliability perception relative to Jaguar and Subaru — and only two steps away from ‘We’re selling your radio data to stay afloat’ GM, too?! https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/06/29/2025-jd-power-initial-qua...

Ugh. I may not personally like their cars but I still hate to see it when notable brands swan-dive into the rocks rather than just wind down gracefully. Hopefully Toyota handles this better, given they’re facing a financial engineering crisis of their own with operating profits down to a mere 2.5% of sales: https://www.toyota-industries.com/investors/item/2025_annual... anyways

> Sato has claimed Toyota is in a “battle for survival” against Chinese automakers. Going forward, the company will have to loosen its infamously strict quality standards to cut costs and increase output.

— https://www.autonocion.com/us/toyota-crisis-chinese-evs/

> 2023: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/toyo...

You can safely assume it's only getting worse until proven otherwise.

Many car companies have managed to fail and cease operations without destroying their brand with, as the article title describes it, “showing commercials on their car’s dash screens”. While I agree that they’re as greedy and shitty as the other companies — though GM and Rivian have them beat on that for denying CarPlay over its data processing protections! — it’s too early to identify which brands will next self-immolate with video ads like this.

It’s infuriating to see that if Toyota would just stop trying so hard to sell cars, they wouldn’t be at risk of this. Something like 90% of their sales profits on a 25% markup from production cost are spent on marketing to get each sale?! That reeks of the same kind of desperation to show growth in growth of profits that BMW is showing, so they’re definitely in the at-risk category now.

Mozilla is leveling this criticism? How about leading by example?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

Thanks to altairprime for mentioning it first:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137765

Mozilla is right to level criticism, regardless of hypocrisy.

The internal debate around the Mr. Robot events was even more fiery than the public reaction, and while the Corporation has busily continued enshittifying, that does not excuse dismissing the Foundation’s critique of auto manufacturers. You’re not only confusing two entirely separate business entities that are formally operated apart from each other, that would risk 501(c)(3) revocation if they fail to maintain that chasm — you’re discrediting a serious and real breakdown of privacy violations on the grounds of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy does not invalidate legitimate objections. It could, if these had been the same organization as you assumed, invalidate the stated and unstated motivations driving publication. Concrete facts and negative reviews present by an unpalatable and biased source may still be accurate and relevant. What motivation did you consider suspect here, and why do you feel should invalidated their claims regarding auto manufacturers? You could well be right, after all, and I’d rather consider your full viewpoint than dismiss it for being incomplete.

I wasn't saying that this invalidates the objection. I was (very clearly) asking them to lead by example. Regardless of the legal structure, the non-profit should still be calling the shots, and should still be vetoing efforts like the Mr. Robot tie-in (which their reps agree with, if you follow the story).

The reason I think the hypocrisy is interesting is that (as I've said before[1]) the contrast should be a source of insight, and it's right to expect a organization concerned about the public to use said insight. Here, the insight is:

"Okay, you're ostensibly non-profit and pro-user and yet you still forced ads on the user. You already got the lecture on it being bad and supposedly agree with it, so what happened? What would have aligned your incentives, and how can that be applied more generally?"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121059

> the non-profit should still be calling the shots

I truly wish this were the case sometimes. Perhaps things would have gone differently for us if it had been. One can dream. Maybe someday they’ll do it, anyways.

I don't know. I think the goalpost is constantly being moved as to what is acceptable, and they're just trying to squeeze out more revenue per car sold.

And what better way to do so by using this large space in a car?

Thank God they downloaded it over their own 4G connection, not the one I pay for (yes I got the message this morning in my iDrive 7 car...).

Choosing to move that particular goalpost suggests financial problems, though. If they were making excellent cars and a reliable profit growth at the same rate as a growing U.S. upper middle class population, then they’d be completely set for life and would never have had to stoop to this. What isn’t clear yet is whether their apparent failure is rooted in macroeconomic, manufacturing, and/or operations — but choosing the “race to the bottom” indicates they are no longer a luxury brand, and that’s their golden goose killed and eaten for a promo. Look to the absolute wreckage done to the Firefox brand solely by the Mr. Robot promo, as an HN-recognized example in a more familiar industry, and that destruction was to a free brand!

> More importantly, these advertising anti-features gravely - perhaps terminally - violate user trust. This event tells us that “Firefox studies” into a backdoor for advertisements, and I will never trust it again. But it doesn’t matter - you’re going to re-enable it on the next update. You know what that means? I will never trust Firefox again.

(6.5 years ago, 1385 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941799

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