They want us to keep paying them for the rest of our lives.

Many new cars have a garage door opener built into the car. Instead of clipping your own remote onto the sun visor, you press the button already on the car. Honda now wants that to be by subscription. A man brought his car to Honda because the built-in stopped working. The original one was "free" with the car. The new one requires a subscription to use it.

Add this to the $350 key fob that requires $150 or more to program it, and you see what our future is going to be like.

This was on Lehto's Law on YouTube.

 

A few years ago, I kept getting automotive consumer surveys. They were from GM and focused primarily on my "tolerance" to the idea of subscription based services. I checked "NO" to every single one. Never got another survey again.

 

Ya, I’ll never pay for subscriptions for automotive stuff…..radio, garage door opener etc. I still use the push button battery powered opener clipped to my visor, all 3 cars.

 

BMW was trying to do this I think with heated seats. On some level it makes sense. I'm looking for a Sport/EX 2018+ Manual. If the LX's could be enabled to the EX feature set with a CC the pool of good used cars would be a lot bigger rather than the base models going to the scrap yard early and the good spec ones being unobtanium later.

It would also make manufacturing easier, because then you just make 1 feature set and have simpler forecasting on the line and less missed revenue by under forecasting demand, this has been a problem as old as manufacuting. The GTO was supposed to be like 300 cars/year with that option package because management thought Delorean was a crackpot and it would never sell. Pontiac missed out on millions in year 1

 

Oooh! It looks like someone is falling into the trap. 😲

 

Eh it has it's tradeoffs but we're already past the tipping point where "old cars" will cease to exist. Without subscriptions there are so many single source electronic parts in cars that will go NLA without replacements because of specialized components needed to build them not being there.

Robotaxis will be the future in a lot of regards

 

Specialized components and specialized tools. BMW patented several weird fastener heads specifically to prevent non-BMW people form working on them.

 

Don't even need to get that cynical, Honda has to make parts for 2018 Fit's for 7 years per US consumer law. That ended some time in 2025, so if you have Honda Sensing and it dies there may or may not be parts for you and it may or may not be Honda's fault. The chips that go into may not be available from the supply chain.

Honda may design a compatible replacement, the underlying vendor may be able to support like you can buy Bosch MAFs or the community may throw in and design replacement parts if warranted but without the protocols and specs the community being able to jump in here is unlikely.

This is why I'm leaning more and more towards the Sport not the EX because there's less stuff to break