I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
That seems like a lot of work to own something. At that point I will go with an alternative brand that doesn't have those kind of system or subscription. The problem will be when all the brands have something similar.
Even if it doesn't have all that, if you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
It is legally problematic to remove until you switch financing...
In addition, if tracking bothers you, your tire pressure sensors all have trackable (if there are enough sensors around a city) IDs, and if bluetooth is on, and it probably is, that as well...aside from your cell phone...
My next (secondary) vehicle will 100% be a dumb vehicle from the 90s or earlier.
> if you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
I have never heard of this. Do you have any reference to learn more?
Who exactly does this installing - someone hired by the bank? The dealer? If I pay cash for a vehicle, does that guarantee that the dealer won't install a tracker? How can I find this out?
If you pay cash, you probably can't be 100% sure there isn't one, but it would still be illegal for them to do this. Otherwise, when you loan/lease the car, it's legal for the dealer to put a tracker on 'their own car'/do it as required by the bank ('their own car' or a car they have a 100% value lien on, for those of you in lien states).
Via the article, the FTC was supposedly probing these to determine 'if the availability of car loans outweighed the privacy issues', but nothing came of it (which is why i'm not hopeful for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426633 ).
We leased a new Jeep Cherokee from a Miami dealership some time ago. It was a company car and was financed. Some months later we noticed the odometer was blinking constantly so we took it in for service to a different dealer. The tech pulled it out and told us about it. He said they didn't do it at that dealership, but some do it.
It was just hanging off the OBD2 port, so if you're concerned about it when leasing or buying a new car then just make sure to check that port.
I still have it in a box somewhere. I'm not sure if there's anything interesting that can be done with it...
Usually it is installed by some “tech” at the dealer, installing on the OBD port is unusual as it is where people will look first, it can be installed anywhre there’s constant 12v power, newer trackers are very small (the size of a gum pack) and have their own battery. Tracking after the payment is done is not usual as the dealer has to pay a fee for the network but the tracker stays there and i guess it can be re-activated.
A while back I set up a Ubiquity Wi-Fi system for a friend who lives near a fairly high-traffic street.
The default Ubiquity scan interval for spectrum and Wi-Fi network awareness was enough to map schedules for a shockingly high number of people driving by.
I imagine something custom built for this purpose would be significantly more, umm, “effective” for this purpose.
I've removed one and never heard anything. I doubt they even check if it's functioning unless they are attempting to repossess the car. As I recall, some modules have the ability to unlock and start the car as well (I think; it was years ago when I found one and researched it...)
> If you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
What kind of janky banks are you working with?
My spouse and I financed a couple of cars recently, one new and one slightly used, and did not have anything of the sort. Different manufacturers, different banks, different dealerships.
But how does this actually happen? Who puts the tracker on there and when?
Sure, if you finance through the dealership, then dealership personnel could stick it in there before you drive away, I guess. It plenty of people finance through third parties. Surely Wells Fargo, for example, doesn’t send an agent down to stick a tracker in your car while you’re sleeping or at work…
It's even better. To avoid having to enter the serial numbers of them into your car, your car just listens to all the TPM sensors chirping around it. After enough time, your car finds four (or more) that follow you around and decides those are yours.
They've been around for decades, both for thru-hole and surface-mount. When you're using automated machinery, you don't want to mess around with wire jumpers; a zero-ohm resistor can be inserted or pick-and-placed using the same automated equipment that normal resistors are placed with.
Ah, but the trick is to get the low tolerance ones. Two reasons:
A) then it’s +/- 20%, right? Which means you bucket them and resell the + ones, using the rest to mine crypto, and
B) you save money because 5% of 0 is no more than 20%.
They're rarely just jumpers, they're often fuses as well because they have a current rating. 0 Ω are sometimes uses as sacrificial fail safes when there's not a cost budget for thermal self-resetting fuses such as those used in automotive applications. And it's usually cheaper to bridge two pads with a blob of solder than maintain and source another part in the BOM.
I suppose, though, if you look up those ratings, they aren't terribly different from the max current ratings of a copper wire with roughly the same cross-section area.
> if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
"By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
"More customer value" clearly worth 125$/month.
You're basically paying > 100 bucks a month for something that allows them to collect and sell your data to third parties.
EDIT: as people mention in reply, I have absolutely zero reading comprehension skills and the fee is actually 1500 for three years not one. Still... I pay less for cellular service with near limitless data and voice.
There are taxes too depends where you are. So likely closer to 50. At least calculate that way give oneself an assurance 41.67 is fixed for 3 years. It could be likely they intend to charge maybe 30/mth and then ramp up to 60/mth towards the end. So at the end of 3yrs, it will be 60x12x3 instead of 41.67x12x3. We got official near 10% inflation (unofficial near 20%). I doubt that 41.67 is what they have in mind for coming months.
Seems they do, more or less. I once had a GM vehicle where the OnStar system (not activated) would occasionally fail to turn off and drain the battery overnight. Although, once I discovered the source of the problem yanking the fuse made it go away.
I am not completely sure, but it appears to be a one-time charge for an initial three-year subscription.
I have no idea whether GM is also making some not-quite-essential but both simple and useful features only accessible with an ongoing subscription, but I have my opinion as to whether it will do so, if it is not doing so already. Plenty of other manufacturers do this.
Visible - $25 a month on Verizon network, unlimited data and calls, no throttling. Though...after hitting > TiB usage per month for a few months in a row they did send me a warning, but didn't cut me off
I ran into this pricing a chevy duramax recently. On their site one can "build" a vehicle by customizing packages. I don't really know what this "build" process is for because at the end it just searches for dealers that have inventory with n out of x features one selected, or "request a quote" which is really the same thing. It's a very misleading process in my opinion.
Anyway... I tried removing OnStar and the only way I could do that was to remove all the feaures I wanted and also needed. e.g. towing package, bigger engine, etc... The only way I could "build" one without Onstar was to have a bare-bones model with nothing else added. Ill try again in 5 years or so.
It searches inventory first because there’s no sense in ordering one to be built if there’s one sitting around already. “Request a quote” is a synonym for “because of dealer protection laws you can’t actually do anything on the website so now go talk to a dealer who can actually order one.”
no sense in ordering one to be built if there’s one sitting around already
I think that's the catch. Given the number of customization options in the website, I would find it highly unlikely that there would be one already built with the options I selected, so I will always be guided down the path of working with a dealer.
Currently, even more so, since there’s not much of anything on lots.
However, people in this country are notoriously impatient and can often be persuaded to buy a very similarly spec vehicle if it means getting it sooner.
I bought my last car from the “local inventory” despite not being exactly what I “built”.
You have to work with a dealer no matter what. But in the "old days" (pre-Covid) you'd probably be surprised at how many vehicles were available with the options you want. I've been leasing my vehicles for a long time, and I've always been very specific in the options I want. I've never once had to order a vehicle to get what I wanted, the salesperson either had one on their lot or was able to find one nearby and trade for it.
Had this same problem, I think it's just the web sites. Every now and then you can find pre-builts with all the features you wanted and just the features you wanted so you may just have to order it through a human being. Case in point I couldn't customize a Camry on the Toyota to have a factory installed alarm system and one day I was browsing their inventory and there was one. Od course someone bought the car and probably sold it to Carmax for a few thousand profit, but the used car market scam going on now with car hoarding and price inflation is another story.
At certain times they open up building to actually order it and sent to a dealer for you to purchase. Most of the year it seems they do not accept orders. Similar experience on Ford.com for most vehicles. I would agree though, it's very frustrating.
It's even more fun when you realize the dealer price they show for the ones they match is MSRP and the dealer is actually selling it for thousands more, plus the dealer adds accessories so you get to overpay for things like cargo nets and floor mats.
Meanwhile in EU, I can configure any Volkswagen-group car down to the finest detail and have it delivered to a dealer of my choice, and the price will be the same across all dealers.
Current VW's website in the US is doing the same thing. Click Build leads you to find inventory. The German VW website car configurator crashes for me, but it is prompting me to look at what is already available.
Europe has both so it isn't a binary thing. There are 'main dealers' that have ready built stock / floor models or you can hunt around within that chains' group for stock that meets your spec or you can have built to order.
You are not driving a completely custom car off the lot right after you buy it in the US. So this is not a convenience relative to the OP. Furthermore, in the present market you may indeed buy a car, but it is highly unlikely to be what you really want.
I've had a great time getting car salesmen to include floor mats for free.
One guy literally tried to tell me he couldn't do that - and I had to spell it out for him. Step one, agree to give me floor mats. Step two, you walk over to the service dept, buy floor mats, and put them in my car. Step three, congratulations you made a sale and commission - but you had to buy floor mats for my car.
I dislike boomer tactics as much as anyone (especially the bizarre trope of yelling at people to sound more right) but car salesmen are nearly as degenerate as realtors so I do take pleasure in this kind of a transaction where I'm the boot of the joke.
> Similar experience on Ford.com for most vehicles
At least for Ford F-series trucks, you must place the order through a dealer. You can build the truck online and take the build to the dealer for the order. In my experience the online build tool is sophisticated enough that it properly reflects the real order entry system. Not sure if it’s the same for the rest of the models.
There are times throughout the year you can place the build order online. You still need to choose which dealer to have it go through. Last time I saw Ford.com available to build and order non-ev's was last December. I think the window that feature was available was about a month.
> at the end it just searches for dealers that have inventory
Most U.S. states have laws requiring car sales only through dealerships. That's why you can't just directly buy a vehicle fully customized from a manufacturer.
I think you may need to get around the "Fleet" wall to get a truck the way you want it. One of my friends recently purchased a GMC with a 7,000lb towing capacity / gooseneck. It was a pretty storied process for him. He ended up taking delivery several states east of where we are.
I would be very interested in this story. I myself am trying to buy a completely bare bones (no power windows, no CD player, no nav, no speaker upgrades, no leather, no lane assist, no blind spot monitoring, no reverse camera, bo auto tailgate,). I just want a bare bones work truck with air conditioning and a diesel motor.
The more I read about car subscriptions and the "connected" nature of current and upcoming vehicles the more inclined I am to keep my current car running until parts for it are literally unobtainable.
Environmentalists/climate helpers can’t agree about anything. People worried about carbon will usually want you to keep the car, but others assume that the engine is more polluting.
I was on a local council once and some lunatics were arguing about cups. One faction believed that styrofoam was better because it was lighter, the others pearl clutched and demanded a styrofoam ban and wanted to ensure that a certain type of wax was used on cups.
I wish I was a rich person who could have stockpiled circa 2003-5 Honda Pilots and Odyssey’s. IMO the perfect family car.
My Pilot had 245000 miles and was fantastic, I had to get rid of it last year. The new car I got to replace it sucks, with the stupid touchscreens and shittier interior.
In the US you can do that already, but I wonder if it will be cheaper for decades to come to purchase a used commercial vehicle (typically a pickup truck or van) and overhaul it as long as the frame is good. The amount of information mechanics can find online these days about some pretty esoteric rebuilding procedures boggles my mind. What I see folks refurbishing in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Pakistan and elsewhere to keep on the roads is astonishing (albeit only possible in current markets as we implement them with high-skill, low-cost labor).
There are a hell of a lot of light-to-heavy duty diesel pickups in the US and the aftermarket offerings are enormously deep and broad, for example. I imagine that will take awhile to fade away, and if metrology gets advanced and cheap enough, and integrates well enough with machinists on the floor, I can see a possible future where these parts live on in electronic form to the point where reproducing them from scratch gets into the realm of economically feasible.
I'm not aware of any dumb TV manufacturer after over a decade of smart TVs. I'm afraid the demand for dumb devices is simply not sustainable. People get accustomed to the new normal very quickly.
This comes up over and over again. There is a brand that sells through Wal Mart in the US (Sceptre) which tends to not have smart features. They are not high end sets.
You can also get 'commercial' sets intended for signage that are apparently OK too. Jeff Geerling did a video on an interesting one from Sharp/NEC that takes a smart module, which can be a raspberry pi, here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-epPf7D8oMk. There are some caveats, but it's something to keep an eye on IMO.
It seems to be true that there are no high end/aspirational sets that don't have smart features. I haven't personally seen any OLEDs, for example (although I am not an authority on this).
The commercial TVs without smarts are getting hard to find. We don’t allow unmanaged OSs in some secure areas and finding them is harder and dramatically more expensive than a few years ago.
My sister and her husband bought a "smart" sound bar. Theoretically it only needs an audio hookup. It does some type of HDMI passthrough, I think it is called "ARC". It has a WiFi connection but they never hooked it up.
After about 3 hours of use, it would have to be powercycled or the audio would constantly cut in and out. My dad looked at it & he decided to connect it to WiFi to check for a manufacturer firmware update. There was no update. However, this fixed the issue entirely. The problem never happened again.
A literal wired speaker, requires a WiFi connection to work properly.
I'm hoping for this as well. It's probably going to be way more expensive than normal though, considering how efficient car manufacturing is and how hard it is for new players to get into (and the loss of revenue for not having "smart" features)
This is very unlikely, as the regulations are set up to protect the incumbents. Just to sell a new vehicle in the US you have to crash test several copies of the vehicle.
Like how Apple ruined the MacBook Pro from 2016-2020 (butterfly keyboard, loss of ports, loss of magsafe) and I was holding on desperately to the 2015 model until they gathered their wits again.
> The difference is that cars are a extremely competitive market, and the "no connected" version will always be offered.
Are they? Cars are an extremely difficult market to break into, much more so than laptops/etc.
All mainstream manufacturers are already on the way to do the whole "connected" thing (the hardware has been there for a decade, it's just a matter of software) and the vast majority of people don't seem to mind.
Starting a car manufacturer is already a huge expense, even more so if your only customer base is the small percentage of the population who understands the downsides of connected cars.
More likely we'll see reverse-engineered aftermarket replacement controllers that behave just like the original but don't have any connected/DRM crap in them - that market is much easier to break into and you may not even need to make any hardware - just refurbish & reflash the original ones.
Cars are insanely competitive, to a point. But it’s a dying market with a captive supply chain that’s been spun off over the years. Everyone is trying to milk the cow for as long as possible.
The little companies that make knobs or whatever AND deal with the bullshit associated with car companies are investing zero. One of the reasons why cars now look the same.
It’s definitely an extremely competitive market. But…
Can you name a currently-produced car that doesn’t have the SOS button on it? It’s been mandatory in the EU since 2018. I can’t find proof that it’s mandatory in the US, so maybe you can find one that doesn’t have it.
Anyway, it if has that button (technically named eCall), it has the hardware in place to be fully connected. So the manufacturers figure they might as well use it for other data collection and get some money out of being forced to include that hardware.
I doubt the parts for mine will ever become unobtainable, at least the parts that make it stop and go, as there's a huge aftermarket. Indeed, I suspect the "smart" stuff I've added will become unrepairable first.
(It's a stereotypical American "land yacht" with some performance mods and a bit of computer monitoring --- not control.)
Because they are earnest. If your behavioral choices negatively affect others, that must be accounted for somehow, either through paying extra so we collectively can deal with the fallout, or banning it, if it causes too extreme of an effect on others. Negative externalities must be accounted for, this isn't a controversial statement to anyone other than entitled people.
If this is the excuse being stated, but there is some ulterior motive, then that's another thing.
The people who are driving decade+ old cars don't need a paternalistic tax to remind them they're "doing it wrong". They get reminded every day. If you think they're the entitled ones your ivory tower must be a tall one.
For what its worth, this is a massive pet-peeve of mine.
I forget exactly who does it, TicketMaster, or Axios, or something - will say something like:
> Ok, two tickets for the concert; that's $120
I'm like great. No idea how you came up with that number, but I'm good with it.
Then they'll come back after I'm locked in and say:
> There's also a convenience fee of $30. Your total is $150.
I'm livid at this point - which is totally irrational; because had they just told me the cost was $150 up front - like an idiot, I'd have just said "well, that's the price. Here's money."
Instead, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth and hate all ticket vendors who I feel pulled a fast one on me.
I'm sure you could make the argument that a greater percentage balk at the $150 number than would walk at $120 + $30, so you make more money. That's fair, but to me it feels like I was tricked for no good reason.
Because Wall Street treats subscription revenue differently than one time income. So if they can put that $1500 on the books split up over three years as recurring subscription, that helps their stock price.
For you yes, you'd rather have cash now. But for a public business, investors want to see continuing and growing revenue. So they need a mix of both. Subscription revenue is more stable as long as your subscriber base is steady or growing.
That still doesn't make sense. In this case, the "continuing revenue" is deliberately artificial and strictly worse than the upfront payment. To the extent that your valuation "likes" the latter in such a case, that valuation method is predictably, avoidably flawed, and will be outcompeted by non-goldfish-attention-span valuation methods.
Recurring revenue is worth 7-15x. One-time revenue is worth 1-3x.
I could rant for hours on how absurd this is, but it’s better to just abuse it. You know mba and finance people are idiotically valuing revenue in this way. So game it.
No, this is just wrong. Whoever came up with this theory has no idea what they’re talking about. If there’s a non-zero probability of the subscription not being canceled (more revenue) then yes, more revenue is good. Otherwise later revenue is bad, public or private. There is no exception to this.
I think you're are looking at this with a very narrow lens.
a) GM can remotely disable the car if the subscription isn't paid. So likelihood of abandonment is minimal.
b) more importantly, this takes $1500 off the sticker price, making GM cars more appealing when compared to Ford, BMW, etc. People who don't buy a GM car don't buy OnStar subscriptions at all... so just increasing the volume of subscriptions is the most important metric
c) 3 years/$1500 is just the minimum. People who have paid for 3 years are likely to keep paying in year 4, 5 and beyond. Totally different reaction than just starting a new monthly payment in month 37. And GM can add new features as upcharges to increase those payments in future years.
d) GM can use the recurring subscription creatively to roll owners into a new GM car. Think family plans where the 2nd sub costs less, or a % of future subscription payments are credited against the cost of a new vehicle.
Yes, obviously if you increase revenue and/or create new, valuable service opportunities, that’s more valuable. Merely changing the form of existing revenue: not valuable. Getting the same cash later: not valuable. So now we’re back at this point, which is perhaps obvious, that if you sell something with value, it could be valued by “Wall Street.” There is nothing counterintuitive or non-obvious worth pointing out here.
Wrong. If you increase revenue, that’s not the same as changing the form of the revenue (and delaying cashflow to boot). The comment suggests that the latter is more valuable. It is not.
Predictability. Recurring subscription revenue is drastically easier to forecast and plan cash flow around, and the financial models can be so much simpler to work with than non-transactional sales.
I'm going to guess it's because when you buy a car, you don't buy it from GM. You buy it from the dealer. That $1,500 option can become whatever inflated price the dealer puts it.
While if it's a subscription from GM, it's $1,500 and that $1,500 directly goes to GM.
Because the optics of a car company disabling a feature that was included with the car after three years unless you start paying for it and continue paying for it indefinitely are even worse.
Similar reasons to why things are priced at $x.99 or why car prices are often quoted in per-month payments or why mail-in rebates make you mail something in rather than just give you a discount. Or why the dealer doesn't even mention the mandatory "prep" charge until after you've shaken hands on the deal.
Perfectly rational people may factor everything in properly... but the world is woefully short of perfectly rational people.
They could do that and I'm sure they considered it. In the end, the consumer pays the same price. But I'm sure there are some internal accounting games going on. The $1500 is booked over the next three years, not all at once. So I'm guessing the accountants may have a plan.
I don't want to re-type the story here, but I had a "fun" time getting OnStar to cancel the demo service when I purchased my pickup several years ago. Story is in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816479#21826049).
The USA really needs better consumer protection laws. In my country that would clearly be an illegal bundled sale and illegal bait and switch. If you advertise product A for X amount, then a customer with X amount in their pocket should be allowed to walk out with product A, any deviation from that should be illegal.
(slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
Sales tax in the US is not a Value Added Tax, so putting just the post tax price on the sticker is not actually enough, the sticker would need the pre-tax price too, as some purchases can be exempt from sales tax.
Most VAT based countries have a single VAT rate for the whole country (or possible a country-wide set of rates for different types of products). The United States is not like that. Even if we consider an individual state as the equivalent to Country, each state does not have one consistent sales tax rate.
Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
That complicates things a lot. For example, if a law required the shown prices to include tax, it would mean that an online website cannot show you the price until you have entered your exact street address. Most people don't want to tell the website where they live just to find out a price that may not be any good.
The variable tax rate means that if the law applied to advertised prices shown on say TV, it would not be possible to have nationwide advertisements that show a price, or even statewide advertisements, or in some cases not even city-wide advertisements. (Unless they set a post-tax price based on what they can sustain with the highest tax rate, which means charging people in lower tax areas a higher price than they would otherwise have charged, just to be able to mention a price at all on TV). Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
Most people who want such post tax pricing laws would not be terribly happy with a law that allowed advertising a range like that.
I've heard this excuse, that tax situation is too complicated, and never understood it. The store knows to charge me the correct value, including all appropriate taxes, when I come to pay. So the data clearly is there, and therefore choosing not to show it to me up front is indeed bait-and-switch. They're telling me a price that is not going to be what they'll actually charge me.
It’s also a logistics thing. Since we also shop online. Store want online prices to match what’s seen in store and making the two match would be a nightmare and not reasonably viable.
On the other hand thing like cars really should have an all inclusive price sticker. They already have an itemized price sticker on the car so there is really nothing stoping these sellers from putting the remaining fees and taxes on there two as that should be consistent with the same dealer location and with such low inventory.
Given that most stores weren’t printing final price pre-internet, I highly doubt this is the reason. Though I do recall some really small convenience stores not getting the memo, but amongst them it isn’t/wasnt common
If displaying post tax prices is not required by law, then it is usually a competitive disadvantage.
People will see the post tax price, compare it in their head with the pre-tax price they saw at some other store, and feel like the post tax prices store is more expensive even if this store’s final price is actually slightly lower than the other store’s price.
Are you advocating requiring user registration with an address and login just to view products on an e-commerce site? I would dislike that far more than just knowing my sales tax rate is X% and to factor that in my head. I’d probably do significantly less online shopping if I had to register to see products.
Lots of possible solutions to that though, for unregistered users you could have an option to select sales tax % that would default based on location if you let the site access it. How many different sales tax rates actually exist in the US and how often do they change?
> How many different sales tax rates actually exist in the US and how often do they change?
Thousands. Every municipality in my area can have their own sales tax and can change them whenever they want. For Texas alone that's ~1,220 potentially different sales taxes which can change at any time. Its not an impossible to keep track of thing though, plenty of organizations do it and most payment processors will essentially handle it for you. But its not exactly easy, aggregating all that and getting it all right in the first place is a good bit of work.
Sure, I agree there are probably some half-useful middle ground solutions.
There are thousands of different sales tax rates in the US that change multiple times per year.
Each city, county, state and other things like metro transit districts, water districts and school districts can all contribute to the sales tax rate paid by an individual at the point of sale.
The answer to both is a lot. It’s not just state level but also county, municipal etc levels. Every month there are dozens and dozens of tax rate changes.
That’s not the topic of discussion though. They currently manage it fine because it’s done at point of sale. How would that work if you have to advertise the price including the sales tax?
Maybe. But have you ever considered stores that offer pick up vs. dine in options? In Ohio for instance, pick up orders of food of any kind aren't taxed, but dine-in is. So if you're at a fast food restaurant they can't magically change the prices on the menu to include tax just because they now know you're dining in.
> Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
What's wrong with this solution?
Getting rid of sales tax would be the best solution imo but complicated
Very complicated. Getting rid of consumption tax, means income tax is the sole source for citizen taxation.
To replace consumption tax, which ensures those with large savings, yet no income, still get taxed as they spend, you'd have to somehow have full disclosure of all assets, and tax that, along with all the privacy implications.
And just imagine all the work, with every citizen's assets being examined yearly.
Of course, there are other options, but not many which replace consumption tax.
There are many other taxes. There are tariffs, capital gains, or estate taxes, for example.
Additionally, not all consumption taxes are across-the-board sales taxes.
Across-the-board sales taxes are highly regressive taxes, because basic consumption needs are relatively flat across a population, so the poorest people pay a much higher percentage of their income in sales taxes than the wealthy.
The way that could be fixed is classifying goods and services into socio-economic class demand (A, B, C+, etc).
Here in Mexico we have something called the "canasta básica" (basic basket) which encompasses a set of goods that are defined as basic for living (they are 40 https://www.gob.mx/canastabasica unfortunately the list is in an image so not easy to google translate... stupid government pages). These are closely guarded by the government and I believe the price is closely protected.
Something like that could be extrapolated, and set different taxes to different goods and services. Like, (IMHO, please don't flame me) an XBOX should be heavily taxed, running shoes should be heavily taxed, a "gaming graphics card" should be heavily taxed. Same with services: "go cart racing" should be heavily taxed, Fast-food should be heavily taxed, while fixing stuff (fixing your blender, or your washing machine) should not.
As insane as that is, I think it makes the sales tax more progressive, as poorer people
spend a high proportion of income on food. I am always struck when I travel to a place like South Carolina, where the property taxes are low, but people with nothing are paying 9% sales taxes on food.
Alaska gets a lot of money from natural resources. New Hampshire gets a lot of money from property taxes. They do have sales tax on a few items, but call it something else (I think restaurants and hotels?). I don't know about the other states.
Many landlords and development companies add on percentage based fees. Some merchants will report these on recipes as PIF Tax (Property Improvement Fees). These are not a technically a tax, but impact the consumer the similarly
Even if you are tax exempt or buying non-taxable items like food, the property own still collects PIF.
PIFs are in the contract between the landlord and merchant the actual details of how fees work are not publicly know. Merchants may benefit from actual property improvements, or the fees are entirely a profit stream for the landlord.
I have never seen this- where have you seen it? I know some places pay a % of their sales to their landlord, but I have always seen that included in their advertised price.
In my state if I photograph a wedding and give the client a flash drive of the photos, I need to charge them sales tax on the entire wedding. If I just deliver the photos online, there’s no sales tax.
If they (or a family member) later purchase prints through their online gallery that are essentially drop shipped to them? Who the hell knows.
Stickers in Europe show both pre and post-tax prices. Online sales just charge you with the tax of their origin country. Anyway difficulty to advertise is no reason to not show real prices on in-store stickers.
>Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
There's a simple solution to this: stop doing this. Ban cities and districts from having their own sales taxes. There's no reason to allow this. In my country, there's a single national sales tax that's the same everywhere.
The US's problems are a result of its own stupid decisions.
My guess is that your country is much smaller than US (in both population and territory) and what’s more important have strong central government with only minor powers delegated to local authorities. That’s just not US where central government is responsible for fewer things and has strong local authorities that actually responsible for most things that you encounter day to say. (though unfirtunately central gov power is creeping up)
I live in one of the few states in the US with no sales taxes. It boggles my mind when I go to a store in another state, and buy a $0.99 soda, and the total comes to $1.07. I have also never understood why the price isn't including the tax.
We had taxes bundled in the price for years in Canada. And it was changed to being separate and added on at the point of sale. The rationale given at the time, was that people should know the actual price of the things they're buying, and how much extra they're paying to support government. Essentially, the argument is that the cost of government shouldn't be invisible.
In Australia all prices include GST (equivalent of VAT) but invoices typically show how much the GST component is, which seems to achieve both goals. Plus everyone just knows GST is 10% and applies to almost everything except food and a few essentials. So there's no hiding the cost of government.
Intellectually, I know that you are correct. However, to this day, every time I buy something a bit pricey, the extra charge always feels a bit dear. That contemplation isn't as likely if you haven't already internalized the pre-tax price. So while, we both "know" the cost of government, people who every day have to face those calculations in a very tangible way, probably feel it more acutely.
For the same reason that being more aware of your personal spending, leads to better personal decisions. Out of sight, out of mind, is a recipe for less oversight and responsibility from decision makers.
Governmental spending can be a huge drag on the economy, and people may not realize just how much, unless they are personally confronted with the true scale of governmental intrusion. Many people today take it all as an unquestionable given, rather than as one choice among many.
Gas prices change very frequently, so almost everyone uses a digital display to show the price... it is much easier to change 3 or 4 prices than to change thousands of labels when the tax changes.
If the argument is that the number of products and consequent ease of updating pricing to include taxes, then there are a huge group of items that should include tax in the quoted price. Admissions tickets to a movie or concert, flight prices, anything digital/online that can be updated immediately like gas prices, vehicles, etc.
In other words, I don’t think that argument holds.
Yeah, that's one of the many benefits of living in New Hampshire. But what boggles my mind is why people in other states are willing to put up with sales tax at all. You're already being taxed on income. Its just the government double-dipping at that point.
That is implementation specific. And oversimplified. An income tax is regressive if you only look within a tax bracket including the highest one which arguably contains the highest level of disparity within it (quantitatively, though perhaps not qualitatively). More so income tax on capital gains. Just the ability to have the majority of your income taxed as gains is regressive. Sales tax that are limited to luxury goods are progressive. Food assistance is often exempted from certain sales tax, which is progressive.
We can make either type of tax regressive, progressive, or vary by income level to push people toward the median lifestyle.
Implementation costs and the ease of avoidance should be larger concerns I think.
In Nevada there's no income tax, some sales tax, but the vast majority of taxable purchases are luxury purchases made by wealthy tourists and there's also a hotel room tax.
So in that one case, choosing sales tax isn't regressive.
I know. Not only is it silly to call it a double tax, it’s also not even correct. Even in NH that money is taxed at least 3 other times before you spend it. Sales tax would be at least the 4th tax on the same money.
People in all states pay some combo of those 3. Some say no income tax (FL). But that means higher sales tax and property tax. Others have all 3 taxes, but in lower amounts.
Do you really think in New Hampshire you pay less total tax then someone like me, living in the Midwest? You likely do better than NY/Cali, but not the Midwest..
So someone lives in a $400,000 RV in an RV park. They won't pay property tax. Say they are living inherieted money. They won't pay income tax. So sales tax would be their only tax.
Obviously this is a cherry picked example and can't represent but .1% of the population. But each lever you pull for tax rewards/punishes a different group. A famous example if FL has no income tax, letting retirees stretch their fixed pensions further.
In general, if a state has a lot of tourists coming to it. They won't get property tax nor income tax on the visitors, but they WILL get sales tax. So it makes sense to raise the sales tax, so that you can lower the property / income tax for people that live there yearround.
Sales tax and income tax serve different purposes in most countries. And very little of that purpose is actually "raising" revenue - the federal government can in principle always print whatever money it needs and hand it out to states etc. But they do help ensure the fiat currency has irreplaceable value, that there's not excessive money in the system, and for income taxes also help smooth out inequalities. And it's often simpler or less fraught for state-level taxes to be used to supplement revenue raising rather than rely on federal government hand outs.
Nine states have no personal income tax. Of those, South Dakota and Wyoming are the only states that don't have business income taxes. So, only those two states have no income tax.
The sales tax rate can change (sometimes from city to city). It is easier to keep track at the register than it is to keep track in the aisles. That's my best guess.
The sales price can change at each store location. It would be even easier to put the full price on the item in the aisle. Stores now know their inventory and track it by the minute.
I've always thought that it's probably done to engender anger at the notion of sales taxes by making the difference much clearer than it is in other places where the prices are typically bundled, and to display a lower price than the consumer is expected to pay.
Not displaying the taxes is infuriating when visiting other places, since unless you look up all of the applicable taxes you're effectively just guessing at the cost of anything.
I think originally there may have been some "grumble why do we have to charge" but I feel much of it now is big stores wanting to advertise one price for the whole country as best they can - and "tax licensing and dock fees" is a way to get around the varying prices.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. WA has crazy high car registration fees/tax so if someone wants to optimize this they need to drive a cheap car to decrease the burden
While I like the idea of having the tax shown on the price tags... tax rates change a lot in most places in the US. The cost to change all the price tags in a store everytime the rate changes, and to do it overnight, would be crazy. Maybe once everyone uses digital eink price labels...
The price of the soda is $0.99, so that's the advertised price.
When you negotiate salary with a new employer, do you include the employer paid Social Security and Medicare taxes? Do you say I require $100,000 or $107,650 (Social Security is $6,200, Medicare is $1,450)?
In my experience in casual conversation all Americans say their salary as pre-tax, and in Europe it's more split where many people would say their salary is the post-tax amount.
How on earth is this related to consumer protection? It's not as if they are forcing this retroactively. They're just increasing the price for a car by $1500 and including more functionality.
They are a free enterprise that can offer whichever products at whatever prices they want. And consumers are free to vote with their wallets.
No from TFA they’re breaking it out as a separate line item. We can debate that all you like, but it’s not as if they’re just lying about the cost, or charging people more after the fact.
When you go to sign the dotted line, the price includes this charge. If you don’t like it, don’t sign.
Its frightening how many people think we need the government to regulate the most minute details of everything. Vote with your dollar, period, that is the only way the right feedback gets to the right issues.
It's hard to vote with your dollar if the company can lie to you about the price. Sure in this case you'll find out the actual cost eventually but at a point where changing your vote is much harder (maybe a deposit has already been collected, credit check run, the other car you were considering has been sold etc)
So are they lying or will you eventually find out the cost?
Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
> So are they lying or will you eventually find out the cost?
Yes.
This is the kind of deception that starts early on in the process to get you to narrow down your car selection by deceiving you on the actual price of the car.
> Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
It's not hard, but it's definitely not pleasant, and the the auto makers and dealers can do some slimy practices. The parent comment I was replying to seemed to conflate auto makers should not be allowed to advertise an inaccurate MSRP with over-regulation. Also you are not 100% correct about deposits, just ask Bronco reservation holders who put down deposits with dealers for reservations, that later got turned into orders, that when the car arrived had thousands of dollars of surprise "ADM" (Additional Dealer Markup in Ford lingo) added to the buy sheet.
Rent seeking happens precisely because voting with your dollar doesn't work well. "Vote with your dollar" is a platitude based on an oversimplified model of the economy.
Is the cost of living in your country, on average, higher or lower than in the United States?
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
> Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
This is simply not true. The common reviled monopoly strategies include price fixing, collusion, natural monopolies, markets with high barriers to entry, network effects, and others in addition to regulatory capture. Regulations that contribute to monopolistic tendencies are "vanishingly small" in number, you just hear about them a lot because people don't like them.
> if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour.
It may be time to walk through history and see all the dark patterns that were solved by regulation. Before the EPA, it was common for manufacturing companies to dump industrial waste directly into rivers, for example.
Consumers only have so much energy for backlash, and your theoretical system requires everyone to have an encyclopedic memory of all the shitty things that every company does and weigh all of that in their minds when making consumer choices. It's impractical and impossible. Regulatory agencies are a much better system and that's why every modern economy depends on them.
I’d add that recent deregulation (energy markets) & pre-regulation (like cryptocurrency) show that companies are remarkably fast & consistent in enacting proven, exploitive models.
The idea that regulation is a burden on society is fanciful. What is burdensome is regulations that cannot be readily adapted. Unfortunately, popular myths like “regulation bad” is part of the reason regulators stay with policies they would much rather propose updating. Veteran regulators are quite eager to improve their frameworks. It is “politics” that prevents their evolution.
> Consumers only have so much energy for backlash, and your theoretical system requires everyone to have an encyclopedic memory of all the shitty things that every company does and weigh all of that in their minds when making consumer choices.
Hey, uh, there's this thing called Google - most people start there when they're making a big-ticket purchase like a car. Or you could pay for Consumer Reports to get expert-level analysis. Or you can just ask people on the relevant subreddit.
Consumers have access to more information to inform buying decisions than at any point in history. So unless General Motors is the only car manufacturer in the world, people can weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions. More intervention from government is totally unnecessary and likely even harmful in the form of generally higher prices.
It clearly isn't. The power and knowledge asymmetry between producers and consumers is such that most producers can get away with abhorrent behaviour pretty much all the time with no significant repercussions. That's why boycotts don't work, among other things.
While I agree this would be ideal, actual prices on cars actually wouldn't be possible in the US. For many (most?) states, for cars/trucks, you pay sales tax based on where you LIVE not where you purchased the car so the price would be different per buyer.
Also, for most cars, paying sticker would be a rip off anyway. Unless there is a shortage going on, no one expects to pay sticker price.
> (slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
How does that work when advertising in media that is available in more than one country, such as broadcasts of major international sporting events?
Where do you live and is Apple's bundling of iCloud (you can only use some major features like the App Store when signed in & you can't choose other providers to fullfil the same role) illegal there too?
The practice of not including sales taxes allows the government to raise sales tax without it impacting the inflation charts, and citizens recognizing the full impact to their wallet.
I don’t agree with the person you replied to but the answer to your question is:
Because the US collects taxes very differently, so you can never make a fair comparison between identical tax categories.
Just look at the gasoline tax differences between the two. The core purpose of that tax and what it’s used to fund varies dramatically between the two regions. So, naturally the amount being taxed would be different.
Also, The US govt tends to have taxes below the rates needed to operate (US has a higher deficit), so the taxes will more likely be lower by comparison.
And a side note, as many EU residents constantly remind us in North America.
We drive greater distances here. More rural miles. More highway miles.
Rural driving (constant 50mph with no stop and start of lights for an hour or more), is far less damaging to roads than start and stop traffic. Interstate miles are the same concept.
Beyond that, expanding and building roads, is cheaper in rural areas.
So there may actually be more gas tax collected per repair cost, even with the rate lower in the US.
Canada has higher gas tax than the US, but lower than the EU. But we also have cold weather everywhere, with frost and ice destroying roads.
So on average, we need more than the US, which only has a few northern/cold states.
From the point of view of the consumer what's the difference? An item that is listed for price P online in the US costs a US buyer P x (1 + s) where s is the sales tax rate and costs an EU buyer P x (1 + v) where v is the VAT rate.
As far as I can see the differences are in what happens on the retailer's supply side. In the US generally there won't be sales tax on the supplier's sale of goods to the retailer. In the EU there might be VAT on those, but the retailer might get to deduct the VAT they pay when they are remitting the VAT they collect.
The net result in both systems is that the consumer pays all of the sales tax or VAT. In the US system the government doesn't see any of that until the final sale to the consumer. In the EU, entities up the supply chain pay part of it but get it back later via deductions so in effect VAT for those entities is a loan to the government which the government pays back from the VAT consumers pay.
For the consumer not much difference. For comparing tax levels it makes a big difference. VAT is a tax on all the steps in the manufacturing & sales process. Sales tax is a tax on the last step alone.
It’s more that we shift where things are taxed (lower sales taxes are made up for with higher property taxes, etc.). Americans pay similar amounts to Europeans when you look at taxes + health insurance but we get less because of politically-mandated inefficiency.
In general, Americans pay less in total taxes but we give that back with much greater expenses for things like healthcare & drug costs, retirement, education, etc. At the top end that works out in your favor but there’s no equivalent for things like our rates of medical bankruptcy for everyone below the highest income levels.
At this point I am really wondering when massive shift to bikes/cargo bikes will happen?
Like... it needs NO fuel or can be charged at home for electric ones, companies literally can't offer other subscription services aside from "free repair" for x$ a month, because bicycle is too simple... Maybe battery leasing, idk...?
It doesn't need driver license to operate, if infrastructure is good, it can be much faster in the city and you don't need to pay a ton of taxes, in many situations you can repair it by yourself
With electric cargo bikes/bakfiets a big chunk of car use-cases is gone, like buying groceries, moving light-medium objects, even take childs to school.
For other 5% of use-cases, people can like... rent a car for a day or take taxi...
I can't imagine how cheap this could be
And for people that can't use them, there are tricycles, carts or duofiets
Aaaaaand you can add a small bicycle trailer at the back, increasing further total capacity.
Of course all this is possible with protected bike lanes AND at least decent public transport like buses AND bike parking. Car drivers will drive without encountering bicyclists and vice-versa, everyone happy, everyone safe, much less stress
I can see why. Cycling in Europe is fantastic, but cycling in North America is terrifying.
I have a car and a motorcycle, but German bike routes are so nice that I still prefer the bike. I bike from the outskirts to the centre of Berlin on a dedicated bike path in nature. It's awesome!
Canada has few such routes. You have to fight for a place on a wide, ugly boulevard lined with box stores, and the drivers take personal offence to your existence.
yep, i can only imagine... I went recently to Switzerland... oh god, so many bikes, dedicated lanes, a ton of parking places inside and outside of buildings. I can imagine myself biking there, but where I live... it is still possible, but much harder(at least for now, but there are plans for improvement)
Many electric bikes are supposed to go back to the shop for maintenance once a year. If you lease the bike this often becomes mandatory. Also more and more manufacturers lock down the electronics and battery systems so nobody can really work on their own bike, at least those drivetrain parts.
I waited a whole year to bring my electric bike in and my maintenance bill was $300+. The higher speed and braking energy puts a lot of wear on the components. After that I learned how to do maintenance myself to save some money but I warn people considering an e-bike that maintenance costs will be non-trivial.
Requiring some ongoing subscription service for fundamental features will eventually be the status quo across the entire industry. There's simply too much money on the table to give up.
In this case GM has taken the perplexing case of front loading the requirement at the initial purchase, but I suspect that it was easier and quicker to implement as a pseudo MSRP bait-and-switch increase than to create a more fleshed out scheme like we see with Toyota and BMW.
A product so valuable GM is now literally FORCING people to buy it. If I'm thinking correctly Car Play negates the need for anything OnStar does (that you might actually care about).
> Car Play negates the need for anything OnStar does
I'm no fan of OnStar or forced subs. But can Car Play call 911 or the police if you are unconscious after a crash? Or prevent your car from being driven if you report it as stolen?
> But can Car Play call 911 or the police if you are unconscious after a crash?
Crash detection isn't a thing in phones generally, but it's worth noting that all cellular devices, regardless of subscription/service status, can call 911 (even without a sim card). You don't need some subscription payment to do that.
I don’t mean to be pedantic but…they’re not forcing you to buy this any more than they’re forcing you to buy the rest of the car. You could always just buy a Ford instead.
“By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
That's some slick words for "Get people to pay for shit they don't want".
And in related news the value of old cars has never been higher.
Government Motors can keep their junk cars and bundled spying service.
“By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
What nauseating corporate speak. I'll translate:
"We are forcing this grabage on our customers so we can drive up the price and remove their ability to opt out of our tracking and spying service," -- which is primed to be used to track driver movements and 'carbon' use (Lol!) and rat back to the nanny state. Just like every electric car.
When I had a vehicle with OnStar, I located where its antennae connected to the controller and disconnected it. The vehicle was fine, nothing else was impacted. It just couldn't communicate with anything anymore.
I originally removed the power, but then most of the "smarter" electronics stopped working.
A hardware toggle provided by the manufacturer would be a lot more respectful of the customer. That sort of respect would even get some subscriptions out of it. But that probably goes against the long term strategy for most places - that connection is for more, later.
How hard was it to disconnect, out of curiosity. Not asking for anything identifying, just wondering if it required removing panels or was just a matter of reaching an arm in the right spot.
Nice to know it can be done without anything too drastic.
On Star is both equipment and a subscription to use it. They mean the vehicle was equipped... with the equipment. Not that they were paying for the subscription. The "mandatory" subscription is a new announcement, and does not apply to previously purchased vehicles.
Their story doesn't really apply here. Fair enough.
My issue is more with 4chan greentext being a low form of communication.
Almost anything is better than it, like "Well, you'd still be paying the subscription." Even direct snark feels higher level than greentext-style rephrasing.
GM doesn't and never will "go out of business" as long as the USA remains a viable nation-state with military needs and financial ability to bail them out.
Unfortunately I feel it is inevitable. They've seen the benefits of it for software and services, particularly for things low on the list of "stuff I can give up in a down economy" and want that revenue and control over the secondary sale market.
I'd be shocked if there weren't mandatory subs for all cars in the next 5yrs, and potentially even one time use or limited use IAPs and in your face promotions for them through car UIs.
It will be gradual while there is competition here, but I suspect they are watching the mobile app and gaming industry quite closely.
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
This has got to be a big competitive disadvantage, unless a lot of consumers cave at the dealership... or all the competitors pick up the same tactic.
If you're comparing a GM vehicle to its competitor, you will not see price parity, as this $1500 "option" will show up on inventory web sites as part of the price (it already does now).
In general, I don't want companies to fail, but I certainly want to see this strategy fail horribly.
The automotive industry is huge because U.S. infrastructure demands having a car, and also because everyone wants to buy "just the right car" for themselves. But these GM luxury brands might struggle with a big price hike like this.
It was explained to me by a advertising buyer at a big regional auto dealership chain that the reason that auto dealers try so hard to get you onto their lot first is that in the vast vast vast majority of cases, if someone shows up in person, they're going to buy one of your cars. It's just up to the salesperson to figure out which one.
He said the very small percentage of people who go from lot to lot are the sort of people who aren't worth the effort, anyway. Which, coincidentally, sounds very much like how the tech industry dismisses "edge cases" and people who need customer service because they aren't efficient and don't "maximize shareholder value."
A large part of selling cars is about the brand, the brand's social image, and what owning a car of a particular brand means to the owner. It's why there are so many brand-loyal car clubs. It's why you find debutantes who only want BMWs. It why you find Appalachian dirt farmer who say "I only buy Chevy." If someone wants a Cadillac, they'll pay the extra $1,500 and pretend it doesn't exist because it's just $25/month hidden in a five-year contract.
Personally, I've owned all kinds of cars. More than once when considering a new car, my co-workers have offered their advice. No matter who it was, the advice was always rooted in the same kind of jingoistic tribalism that infects politics and is the basis of professional sports. My brand is better than someone else's brand. Facts be damned. Here's my wallet.
> He said the very small percentage of people who go from lot to lot are the sort of people who aren't worth the effort, anyway.
But they still have to decide what type each particular person is. I usually play an ignorant buyer for a bit, make them think the sale is about to go through, then walk out unless they give me deal. Buying a car doesn’t happen often so when I do it, I don’t mind spending some time to get what I want. I don’t enjoy the process, it would be nice to just order it online, but since it’s not possible gotta play the game I guess.
This is a tangent and I know there’s already a front page story on it but still couldn’t resist.
By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.
I find it super frustrating. There's been leaps forward in fuel efficiency, but car manufacturers compensate by making trucks and SUVs bigger and heavier. The newer trucks can fit a third adult in the front seat comfortably. I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.
> I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.
You hit the nail on the head. Manufacturers aren't forcing anybody to buy big trucks. They respond to demand. If people show enough demand for a tiny pickup like the Maverick, we'll see competition in the space.
Demand is partially driven by cheap gas. Cheap gas is subsidized by all kind of benefits provided to oil manufacturers, US international policy (ie: military), removing negative externality (increased insurance rate due to global warming) etc.
So I'd say that this is an artificial demand that is driven by policy. If people paid the "true" price of this worldwide oil infrascture, I'd likely be more expensive and big trucks would not be chosen just to move your family around.
If gas wasn't so cheap, more likely the price of trucks would come down to compensate and the same number of units would roll off the lot. GM makes nearly $20,000 in profit on the sale of a truck. For comparison, a Chevy Trax barely sells for $20,000 out the door. The margins on trucks are huge.
It's a tough situation for buyers. I'd rather have a car 90% of the time, for a lot of reasons, but I legitimately need a truck 10% of the time. A car cannot become a poor truck, but a truck can become a poor car, and so the truck wins.
Another way to say that would be 'demand is not artificially constrained by expensive gas.' People want trucks, and the price of gas is not making them change their mind. The electric F150 will probably be sold out at MSRP for years
I mean you're welcome to buy a GM Chevy Spark which is a 4 seater hatchback for like $20k...If customers wanted small cars, they'd build more small cars.
Lots of open space, people choose comfortable cars. Pickups are a little bit bigger now, and they have taken over the role of the land yachts from decades past. I mean, look at the back seat space in an F150. Can't touch that in any sedan, even a full size. No wonder people like them for family cars.
I've been in enough traffic in Hyderabad that I can appreciate why nobody drives a big car there. Different situation.
The U.S. built wide roads in order to be tolerant to the small mistakes people make while driving. It’s called “forgiving design.” Planners were not expecting auto makers to inflate their vehicles to the larger lane width.
A modern F150 is 80 inches wide. ~50 years ago, the F100 was 78 inches wide. Not much change there. The legal limit is 96 inches, and has been since the 1950s.
Part of the reason is that road engineers basically adopted a standard that treated all roads the same as highways in terms of buffer zones and so on.
So they treat a 2 lane road in suburb the same as a highway. Literally.
So you end up with local roads that can fit 4 SUV next to each other despite being like a 2 lane road.
Literally everything is built to accommodate huge cars and even has safety margin for huge cars.
Its actually funny, go to google maps and compare car subburbs from the 50s with those from the 80/90s and you will see the roads being like twice the size. And then you compare it to old street car subburbs and the roads are even thinner.
Ironically those street car subburbs often have population density that make them almost city like.
This all works together to make US style sprawl such a distinctive feature.
In my area its the 1950's and 60's suburbs that started to have enormous streets between houses, like 6 vehicles wide. I have always been curious why this was done.
You can read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town". I have not read it yet but Charles Marohn talks about this a lot.
Basically they just developed road safety principles for highways and then somehow thought it made sense for all roads no matter if there were people there.
One legal reason is fuel economy regulations (CAFE standards) encourage car makers to make their cars large enough to be classified as "light trucks", leading to less stringent fuel economy standards.
A larger footprint also reduces the fuel economy standard, incentivizing larger vehicles.
If a truck or a van is big that seems reasonable to me. What really gets me is how stuff like the Mini. Park a BMW Mini next to a BMC Mini and the modern mini looks like a SUV. Buying cars that comfortably fit in "compact only" spaces in the city is getting harder every year.
It's partially safety. There is a minimum weight for road traction that's observed. It's not larger than an Accord, but certainly a classic Fiat 500 could never be made again.
There also seems to be some social expectation that when you have a family, you need a bigger car, despite modestly-sized cars being perfectly sufficient.
US consumers seem to be in an abusive relationship with traditional car companies.
I've heard that the latest thing is that when buying a car from a dealer you have to sign over power of attorney to them. Insane.
Fortunately since they don't have dealers Tesla manages to be an exception to this power of attorney stuff; not needed or asked for, nothing even remotely close. Also they only charge $100 / year (totally optional) for LTE connectivity. And their mobile service including emergency roadside assistance is dirt cheap. Who would pay $1,500 for OnStar?
The power of attorney thing has been standard practice for ages. It's a limited power of attorney that just lets the dealership submit paperwork to the DMV & bank on your behalf. Nothing sketchy about it.
> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.
> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...
> We may share your information ... with our business partners.
With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.
I used to have the similar service on a 2016 Volvo station wagon.
But the radio module in that car is 3G, and because carriers have been discontinuing 3G Volvo cannot provide their service to my car.
There was roughly 12 months when it was impossible to upgrade the radio in my older model car. Now the radio upgrade is customer-paid and optional.
My point being, if they require the subscription I’d be careful to confirm the service is guaranteed regardless of the carriers and obsolete radios etc.
I am a little surprised how much press this is getting. They are just hiding an MSRP bump in a mandatory 'option'. A bit of an oxymoron for sure. They're not the first manufacturer to pull this stunt, for sure. RV manufacturers, for example, do exactly the same thing but on a far grander scale.
I don't think OnStar is the noteworthy part. They've been putting OnStar on all their vehicles for years.
What features of the OnStar service cost anywhere near $40/month to provide? Your phone does almost all of that for free already. The only sustaining cost is the mobile traffic. (For reference, Tesla's "premium connectivity" feature that provides YouTube and satellite imagery and remote camera streams and such is $10/month).
There is some modularity there at least, I just got a fire tv for pretty cheap, but I never plan on letting it connect to the internet, instead I have a separate box which connects to my streaming apps. I feel like the situation with cara is worse.
Even if there was no benefit from the data collected by the system to the manufacturer, they might still make it a default just because there are supply chain advantages to having a single unique design (with all the hardware & software for the "connected" bit) than maintaining a separate, non-connected SKU.
But of course manufacturers also benefit from the data collection and functionality the "connected" bit offers such as DRM, etc, so why wouldn't they mandate it?
People seem to forget that competition in the way that we talk about when we talk about the free market only really occurs with people who want to upset the established order. When you have a group of long established manufacturers who, broadly speaking, are happy with how the land is divided up you start to see innovations like this one where it raises the profits for all firms. Because you don’t want to risk being a defector and creating a race to the bottom when you can all be fat and happy.
IMO the best vehicles are ones from the early to mid 2000's. They have OBD2 so they're easy to diagnose and tune but no unnecessary computer controls in everything, no touchscreens, parts are plentiful, issues are well known, and they're better built than earlier cars.
The only way I'm giving up mine is after I either drive it into the ground or crash it. I would love a more environmentally friendly vehicle but not at the expense of my ability to actually own things.
All these companies have gotten so fatted, full of a bunch of MBA jackasses with their excel sheets and bonuses.
Do they actually give a damn about building cars people want, rather than squeezing another penny out of consumers to make wall street happy and increase their bonuses?
While there's plenty to complain about with Tesla, they're the first company to have their kind of success (in the US at least) coming out of nowhere.
We need more like that. Tesla also needs actual competition since they've been stagnating a lot.
> Do they actually give a damn about building cars people want, rather than squeezing another penny out of consumers to make wall street happy and increase their bonuses?
No, of course not and that’s totally rational for them. Being mad at people for system’s problem is like being mad at a river for following the slope of the land. You don’t curse the river for destroying your house during high tide, you build a dam.
Ya know what, poor phrasing. You're allowed to be mad at whatever you want. Just don't expect it to do anything so long as the incentives that pushed them to this decision in the first place haven't changed.
prediction -- round II of this leap of technology -- uniformed services and corporate employees get financial incentives, subsidies and "valuable network services" while those outside of that system pay increased costs and have fewer choices for repair and upgrades.
> The $1,500 plan is listed on the window sticker as a separate line item along with other additions to the vehicle’s standard equipment, but there is no option to remove it or order the vehicle without it. Customers who decline to activate their OnStar service will not be given a price reduction, GM said.
> It’s included in the manufacturer’s suggested retail price
That's basically like complaining "what, I bought a car but the price for tires was listed separately, and they didn't let me buy the car without the tires!!!"
There's no guarantee that it will not be added to other models in the future. Because we're talking about a large corporation raising prices, there's no reason that a 2026 Chevy Malibu wouldn't have this. Shareholders would approve.
My inner cynic says some slippery slopes are real.
I guess this depends on how well cars with mandatory subscriptions sell compared to before. If the number of sales goes up, or stays the same I would guess more manufacturers start doing this.
And I'd say this is the slippery slope from smart home devices all requiring a subscription. Since everything "smart" requires backend infrastructure and cloud bills can't be paid for the entire lifecycle up front, get ready to see a lot of subscriptions added to things that didn't have it before.
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?
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).
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
That seems like a lot of work to own something. At that point I will go with an alternative brand that doesn't have those kind of system or subscription. The problem will be when all the brands have something similar.
Even if it doesn't have all that, if you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
It is legally problematic to remove until you switch financing...
In addition, if tracking bothers you, your tire pressure sensors all have trackable (if there are enough sensors around a city) IDs, and if bluetooth is on, and it probably is, that as well...aside from your cell phone...
My next (secondary) vehicle will 100% be a dumb vehicle from the 90s or earlier.
What laws prevent you from removing a gps tracker from your vehicle? It may be a civil agreement between you and the lender?
> if you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
I have never heard of this. Do you have any reference to learn more?
Who exactly does this installing - someone hired by the bank? The dealer? If I pay cash for a vehicle, does that guarantee that the dealer won't install a tracker? How can I find this out?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/dealbook/gps-dev...
If you pay cash, you probably can't be 100% sure there isn't one, but it would still be illegal for them to do this. Otherwise, when you loan/lease the car, it's legal for the dealer to put a tracker on 'their own car'/do it as required by the bank ('their own car' or a car they have a 100% value lien on, for those of you in lien states).
Via the article, the FTC was supposedly probing these to determine 'if the availability of car loans outweighed the privacy issues', but nothing came of it (which is why i'm not hopeful for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426633 ).
We leased a new Jeep Cherokee from a Miami dealership some time ago. It was a company car and was financed. Some months later we noticed the odometer was blinking constantly so we took it in for service to a different dealer. The tech pulled it out and told us about it. He said they didn't do it at that dealership, but some do it.
It was just hanging off the OBD2 port, so if you're concerned about it when leasing or buying a new car then just make sure to check that port.
I still have it in a box somewhere. I'm not sure if there's anything interesting that can be done with it...
[edit: minor grammar]
Usually it is installed by some “tech” at the dealer, installing on the OBD port is unusual as it is where people will look first, it can be installed anywhre there’s constant 12v power, newer trackers are very small (the size of a gum pack) and have their own battery. Tracking after the payment is done is not usual as the dealer has to pay a fee for the network but the tracker stays there and i guess it can be re-activated.
There’s also in-vehicle Wi-Fi.
A while back I set up a Ubiquity Wi-Fi system for a friend who lives near a fairly high-traffic street.
The default Ubiquity scan interval for spectrum and Wi-Fi network awareness was enough to map schedules for a shockingly high number of people driving by.
I imagine something custom built for this purpose would be significantly more, umm, “effective” for this purpose.
> It is legally problematic to remove until you switch financing...
Is it?
Unless their financing T&C specifically tell you you are bound to let them track you, can't you just pop it out and tell them to pound sand?
I've removed one and never heard anything. I doubt they even check if it's functioning unless they are attempting to repossess the car. As I recall, some modules have the ability to unlock and start the car as well (I think; it was years ago when I found one and researched it...)
> If you finance most vehicles they will install a poorly hidden cell tracker that usually draws power from the OBD2 port.
What kind of janky banks are you working with?
My spouse and I financed a couple of cars recently, one new and one slightly used, and did not have anything of the sort. Different manufacturers, different banks, different dealerships.
They don't disclose when they install those devices generally. If they do, it's buried under 100s of pages of documents.
But how does this actually happen? Who puts the tracker on there and when?
Sure, if you finance through the dealership, then dealership personnel could stick it in there before you drive away, I guess. It plenty of people finance through third parties. Surely Wells Fargo, for example, doesn’t send an agent down to stick a tracker in your car while you’re sleeping or at work…
The dealership has an employee who installs it, usually when the vehicle is undergoing what manufacturers call "pre purchase inspection".
The dealership itself, a mainline GM dealer owned by Berkshire-Hathaway.
TIL tire pressure sensors are wireless. I always wondered how they were "wired"
It's even better. To avoid having to enter the serial numbers of them into your car, your car just listens to all the TPM sensors chirping around it. After enough time, your car finds four (or more) that follow you around and decides those are yours.
>0 ohm resistors
Had me scratching my head for a minute there. I guess it's a thing now, though we used to just call them jumpers.
They've been around for decades, both for thru-hole and surface-mount. When you're using automated machinery, you don't want to mess around with wire jumpers; a zero-ohm resistor can be inserted or pick-and-placed using the same automated equipment that normal resistors are placed with.
It's just a funny name to me. Zero ohm and resistor are mutually exclusive.
To me, it's still a jumper, shunt, etc.
Ah, but the trick is to get the low tolerance ones. Two reasons: A) then it’s +/- 20%, right? Which means you bucket them and resell the + ones, using the rest to mine crypto, and B) you save money because 5% of 0 is no more than 20%.
It's also physically impossible for it to actually be 0 ohms. Unless there are consumer grade superconductors that I didn't know about.
That's why 0 Ω resistors have a current rating.
They're rarely just jumpers, they're often fuses as well because they have a current rating. 0 Ω are sometimes uses as sacrificial fail safes when there's not a cost budget for thermal self-resetting fuses such as those used in automotive applications. And it's usually cheaper to bridge two pads with a blob of solder than maintain and source another part in the BOM.
I suppose, though, if you look up those ratings, they aren't terribly different from the max current ratings of a copper wire with roughly the same cross-section area.
Well a wire also has a current rating, I guess that's a fuse aswell?
"Fusible link wire" exists - it is sometimes used in automative wiring harnesses (mostly older vehicles I think).
> if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port
ALL buy-here-[pay|finance]-here car dealerships put a GPS tracker in your car. Where it's located and how it's connected to your car's electrical system will vary, but they ALL do it using[0] companies[1] like[2] these[3].
[0] https://gpsandtrack.com/
[1] https://www.spireon.com/gps-auto-tracking/
[2] https://passtimegps.com/industries/franchise-car-dealerships...
[3] https://logistimatics.com/gps-trackers/car-dealers/
What is so special about GM that you are willing to go through all these?
"By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
"More customer value" clearly worth 125$/month.
You're basically paying > 100 bucks a month for something that allows them to collect and sell your data to third parties.
EDIT: as people mention in reply, I have absolutely zero reading comprehension skills and the fee is actually 1500 for three years not one. Still... I pay less for cellular service with near limitless data and voice.
> ”more customer value”
They are not lying. The value of the customer to GM increases.
It's a three-year subscription, so it works out to $41.67/month. Still absurd though.
There are taxes too depends where you are. So likely closer to 50. At least calculate that way give oneself an assurance 41.67 is fixed for 3 years. It could be likely they intend to charge maybe 30/mth and then ramp up to 60/mth towards the end. So at the end of 3yrs, it will be 60x12x3 instead of 41.67x12x3. We got official near 10% inflation (unofficial near 20%). I doubt that 41.67 is what they have in mind for coming months.
If you don't make the payments do they turn off the ignition remotely until the repo man shows up?
Seems they do, more or less. I once had a GM vehicle where the OnStar system (not activated) would occasionally fail to turn off and drain the battery overnight. Although, once I discovered the source of the problem yanking the fuse made it go away.
I am not completely sure, but it appears to be a one-time charge for an initial three-year subscription.
I have no idea whether GM is also making some not-quite-essential but both simple and useful features only accessible with an ongoing subscription, but I have my opinion as to whether it will do so, if it is not doing so already. Plenty of other manufacturers do this.
I live in an apartment building with no EV charging capabilities in the parking garage. This is my #1 problem with EVs at the moment.
But your point is well founded too.
Do you own or rent ?
You can make a case to your building governing body to have them installed.
There are solutions designed for this and operate off common area energy and bill at on a cost only basis.
My cellular service is only 3GB/month and charges a few cents/minute for the rare voice call I do, but it's less than $7/month.
Visible - $25 a month on Verizon network, unlimited data and calls, no throttling. Though...after hitting > TiB usage per month for a few months in a row they did send me a warning, but didn't cut me off
Provider?
Get outside North America and you'll find that cellular service can be had very cheaply.
I ran into this pricing a chevy duramax recently. On their site one can "build" a vehicle by customizing packages. I don't really know what this "build" process is for because at the end it just searches for dealers that have inventory with n out of x features one selected, or "request a quote" which is really the same thing. It's a very misleading process in my opinion.
Anyway... I tried removing OnStar and the only way I could do that was to remove all the feaures I wanted and also needed. e.g. towing package, bigger engine, etc... The only way I could "build" one without Onstar was to have a bare-bones model with nothing else added. Ill try again in 5 years or so.
It searches inventory first because there’s no sense in ordering one to be built if there’s one sitting around already. “Request a quote” is a synonym for “because of dealer protection laws you can’t actually do anything on the website so now go talk to a dealer who can actually order one.”
no sense in ordering one to be built if there’s one sitting around already
I think that's the catch. Given the number of customization options in the website, I would find it highly unlikely that there would be one already built with the options I selected, so I will always be guided down the path of working with a dealer.
Currently, even more so, since there’s not much of anything on lots.
However, people in this country are notoriously impatient and can often be persuaded to buy a very similarly spec vehicle if it means getting it sooner.
I bought my last car from the “local inventory” despite not being exactly what I “built”.
You have to work with a dealer no matter what. But in the "old days" (pre-Covid) you'd probably be surprised at how many vehicles were available with the options you want. I've been leasing my vehicles for a long time, and I've always been very specific in the options I want. I've never once had to order a vehicle to get what I wanted, the salesperson either had one on their lot or was able to find one nearby and trade for it.
Had this same problem, I think it's just the web sites. Every now and then you can find pre-builts with all the features you wanted and just the features you wanted so you may just have to order it through a human being. Case in point I couldn't customize a Camry on the Toyota to have a factory installed alarm system and one day I was browsing their inventory and there was one. Od course someone bought the car and probably sold it to Carmax for a few thousand profit, but the used car market scam going on now with car hoarding and price inflation is another story.
At certain times they open up building to actually order it and sent to a dealer for you to purchase. Most of the year it seems they do not accept orders. Similar experience on Ford.com for most vehicles. I would agree though, it's very frustrating.
It's even more fun when you realize the dealer price they show for the ones they match is MSRP and the dealer is actually selling it for thousands more, plus the dealer adds accessories so you get to overpay for things like cargo nets and floor mats.
Meanwhile in EU, I can configure any Volkswagen-group car down to the finest detail and have it delivered to a dealer of my choice, and the price will be the same across all dealers.
Current VW's website in the US is doing the same thing. Click Build leads you to find inventory. The German VW website car configurator crashes for me, but it is prompting me to look at what is already available.
Yes but in America people go to a dealer and drive a car off the lot after the sale.
The US way has its convenience of not having to wait 6 months for the car to be built and shipped.
Europe has both so it isn't a binary thing. There are 'main dealers' that have ready built stock / floor models or you can hunt around within that chains' group for stock that meets your spec or you can have built to order.
You are not driving a completely custom car off the lot right after you buy it in the US. So this is not a convenience relative to the OP. Furthermore, in the present market you may indeed buy a car, but it is highly unlikely to be what you really want.
If you go for a Volvo, you have the option of taking delivery in Europe, do a driving tour and have it shipped back to NA: https://www.volvocars.com/us/shopping-tools/shop/overseas-de...
I've had a great time getting car salesmen to include floor mats for free.
One guy literally tried to tell me he couldn't do that - and I had to spell it out for him. Step one, agree to give me floor mats. Step two, you walk over to the service dept, buy floor mats, and put them in my car. Step three, congratulations you made a sale and commission - but you had to buy floor mats for my car.
I dislike boomer tactics as much as anyone (especially the bizarre trope of yelling at people to sound more right) but car salesmen are nearly as degenerate as realtors so I do take pleasure in this kind of a transaction where I'm the boot of the joke.
> Similar experience on Ford.com for most vehicles
At least for Ford F-series trucks, you must place the order through a dealer. You can build the truck online and take the build to the dealer for the order. In my experience the online build tool is sophisticated enough that it properly reflects the real order entry system. Not sure if it’s the same for the rest of the models.
There are times throughout the year you can place the build order online. You still need to choose which dealer to have it go through. Last time I saw Ford.com available to build and order non-ev's was last December. I think the window that feature was available was about a month.
> at the end it just searches for dealers that have inventory
Most U.S. states have laws requiring car sales only through dealerships. That's why you can't just directly buy a vehicle fully customized from a manufacturer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_....
I think you may need to get around the "Fleet" wall to get a truck the way you want it. One of my friends recently purchased a GMC with a 7,000lb towing capacity / gooseneck. It was a pretty storied process for him. He ended up taking delivery several states east of where we are.
I would be very interested in this story. I myself am trying to buy a completely bare bones (no power windows, no CD player, no nav, no speaker upgrades, no leather, no lane assist, no blind spot monitoring, no reverse camera, bo auto tailgate,). I just want a bare bones work truck with air conditioning and a diesel motor.
I think the reverse camera is a federal mandate, you can't buy vehicles without them any longer.
Eh wouldn't it be cheaper to buy an old used truck and get it overhauled if you don't care about modern features?
Buy it used.
The more I read about car subscriptions and the "connected" nature of current and upcoming vehicles the more inclined I am to keep my current car running until parts for it are literally unobtainable.
I’m glad I ride a bike. The rampant anti-consumer abuse and fee stacking you see with cars do not exist for other types of transit.
The rampant anti-consumer abuse is mainly an American thing, and it's not just cars.
Err, BMW has subscription fees for heated seats and steering, and I’m pretty sure they’re not American.
They're making cars in America, and selling them in America. We're talking about American-market stuff here.
However, I have no idea if they do this subscription fee stuff for their EU-market stuff. Anyone care to chime in?
Isn't that what a lot of environmentalists/climate helpers suggest anyways?
I've heard that driving a vehicle until everything falls apart is a lot more green/climate friendly than immediately switching to something new.
Environmentalists/climate helpers can’t agree about anything. People worried about carbon will usually want you to keep the car, but others assume that the engine is more polluting.
I was on a local council once and some lunatics were arguing about cups. One faction believed that styrofoam was better because it was lighter, the others pearl clutched and demanded a styrofoam ban and wanted to ensure that a certain type of wax was used on cups.
I wish I was a rich person who could have stockpiled circa 2003-5 Honda Pilots and Odyssey’s. IMO the perfect family car.
My Pilot had 245000 miles and was fantastic, I had to get rid of it last year. The new car I got to replace it sucks, with the stupid touchscreens and shittier interior.
Ha I have a 2005 Honda Pilot as my beater vehicle. More than 200000 miles and it runs great. Great pickup as well even after all these years.
I wonder if we get new small manufacturers shops that build dumb vehicles.
In the US you can do that already, but I wonder if it will be cheaper for decades to come to purchase a used commercial vehicle (typically a pickup truck or van) and overhaul it as long as the frame is good. The amount of information mechanics can find online these days about some pretty esoteric rebuilding procedures boggles my mind. What I see folks refurbishing in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Pakistan and elsewhere to keep on the roads is astonishing (albeit only possible in current markets as we implement them with high-skill, low-cost labor).
There are a hell of a lot of light-to-heavy duty diesel pickups in the US and the aftermarket offerings are enormously deep and broad, for example. I imagine that will take awhile to fade away, and if metrology gets advanced and cheap enough, and integrates well enough with machinists on the floor, I can see a possible future where these parts live on in electronic form to the point where reproducing them from scratch gets into the realm of economically feasible.
I'm not aware of any dumb TV manufacturer after over a decade of smart TVs. I'm afraid the demand for dumb devices is simply not sustainable. People get accustomed to the new normal very quickly.
This comes up over and over again. There is a brand that sells through Wal Mart in the US (Sceptre) which tends to not have smart features. They are not high end sets.
You can also get 'commercial' sets intended for signage that are apparently OK too. Jeff Geerling did a video on an interesting one from Sharp/NEC that takes a smart module, which can be a raspberry pi, here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-epPf7D8oMk. There are some caveats, but it's something to keep an eye on IMO.
It seems to be true that there are no high end/aspirational sets that don't have smart features. I haven't personally seen any OLEDs, for example (although I am not an authority on this).
The commercial TVs without smarts are getting hard to find. We don’t allow unmanaged OSs in some secure areas and finding them is harder and dramatically more expensive than a few years ago.
Any TV is dumb if you cut off its internet access in the firewall. A car with a sim card requires a bit more.
No, some still require a menu/GUI for something as simple as cycling inputs. LG, for example.
My sister and her husband bought a "smart" sound bar. Theoretically it only needs an audio hookup. It does some type of HDMI passthrough, I think it is called "ARC". It has a WiFi connection but they never hooked it up.
After about 3 hours of use, it would have to be powercycled or the audio would constantly cut in and out. My dad looked at it & he decided to connect it to WiFi to check for a manufacturer firmware update. There was no update. However, this fixed the issue entirely. The problem never happened again.
A literal wired speaker, requires a WiFi connection to work properly.
I'm hoping for this as well. It's probably going to be way more expensive than normal though, considering how efficient car manufacturing is and how hard it is for new players to get into (and the loss of revenue for not having "smart" features)
This is very unlikely, as the regulations are set up to protect the incumbents. Just to sell a new vehicle in the US you have to crash test several copies of the vehicle.
Very unlikely. All the startups are EV manufacturers with even more technology.
Like how Apple ruined the MacBook Pro from 2016-2020 (butterfly keyboard, loss of ports, loss of magsafe) and I was holding on desperately to the 2015 model until they gathered their wits again.
I certainly see no reason to grasp hold of GM's current range.
The difference is that cars are a extremely competitive market, and the "no connected" version will always be offered.
> The difference is that cars are a extremely competitive market, and the "no connected" version will always be offered.
Are they? Cars are an extremely difficult market to break into, much more so than laptops/etc.
All mainstream manufacturers are already on the way to do the whole "connected" thing (the hardware has been there for a decade, it's just a matter of software) and the vast majority of people don't seem to mind.
Starting a car manufacturer is already a huge expense, even more so if your only customer base is the small percentage of the population who understands the downsides of connected cars.
More likely we'll see reverse-engineered aftermarket replacement controllers that behave just like the original but don't have any connected/DRM crap in them - that market is much easier to break into and you may not even need to make any hardware - just refurbish & reflash the original ones.
Cars are insanely competitive, to a point. But it’s a dying market with a captive supply chain that’s been spun off over the years. Everyone is trying to milk the cow for as long as possible.
The little companies that make knobs or whatever AND deal with the bullshit associated with car companies are investing zero. One of the reasons why cars now look the same.
It’s definitely an extremely competitive market. But…
Can you name a currently-produced car that doesn’t have the SOS button on it? It’s been mandatory in the EU since 2018. I can’t find proof that it’s mandatory in the US, so maybe you can find one that doesn’t have it.
Anyway, it if has that button (technically named eCall), it has the hardware in place to be fully connected. So the manufacturers figure they might as well use it for other data collection and get some money out of being forced to include that hardware.
Such is life
I doubt the parts for mine will ever become unobtainable, at least the parts that make it stop and go, as there's a huge aftermarket. Indeed, I suspect the "smart" stuff I've added will become unrepairable first.
(It's a stereotypical American "land yacht" with some performance mods and a bit of computer monitoring --- not control.)
That sounds anti-social. Perhaps a "polluting vehicle tax "or a "unsafe vehicle tax" will change your mind.
(The above is satire, but analogous statements are frequently made in earnest.)
Because they are earnest. If your behavioral choices negatively affect others, that must be accounted for somehow, either through paying extra so we collectively can deal with the fallout, or banning it, if it causes too extreme of an effect on others. Negative externalities must be accounted for, this isn't a controversial statement to anyone other than entitled people.
If this is the excuse being stated, but there is some ulterior motive, then that's another thing.
If your behavioral choices negatively affect others
The mere act of living can "negatively affect others" by consuming resources.
Let's not go down that path to an authoritarian socialist dystopia.
If that’s your bar we’re already living in a socialist dystopia.
The people who are driving decade+ old cars don't need a paternalistic tax to remind them they're "doing it wrong". They get reminded every day. If you think they're the entitled ones your ivory tower must be a tall one.
Same, and given the car I own, parts will not run out this century.
Maybe I'm dense, but;
Why not just include it in the sticker price of the car? At a minimum for PR / Optics.
You could argue:
> Its like power steering. You don't have the option NOT to have it, and it costs us money; so its part of why the car costs what it does.
That way instead of people feeling like they're being cheated out of an extra $1,500 on a $50,000 vehicle; they just purchase a $51,500 vehicle?
For what its worth, this is a massive pet-peeve of mine.
I forget exactly who does it, TicketMaster, or Axios, or something - will say something like:
> Ok, two tickets for the concert; that's $120
I'm like great. No idea how you came up with that number, but I'm good with it.
Then they'll come back after I'm locked in and say:
> There's also a convenience fee of $30. Your total is $150.
I'm livid at this point - which is totally irrational; because had they just told me the cost was $150 up front - like an idiot, I'd have just said "well, that's the price. Here's money."
Instead, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth and hate all ticket vendors who I feel pulled a fast one on me.
I'm sure you could make the argument that a greater percentage balk at the $150 number than would walk at $120 + $30, so you make more money. That's fair, but to me it feels like I was tricked for no good reason.
:shrug-emoji
Because Wall Street treats subscription revenue differently than one time income. So if they can put that $1500 on the books split up over three years as recurring subscription, that helps their stock price.
That feels so backwards… Does it have a root in reality?
In my personal finance, I’d always rather have $1500 now than an IOU for $1500 over three years.
For you yes, you'd rather have cash now. But for a public business, investors want to see continuing and growing revenue. So they need a mix of both. Subscription revenue is more stable as long as your subscriber base is steady or growing.
That still doesn't make sense. In this case, the "continuing revenue" is deliberately artificial and strictly worse than the upfront payment. To the extent that your valuation "likes" the latter in such a case, that valuation method is predictably, avoidably flawed, and will be outcompeted by non-goldfish-attention-span valuation methods.
Recurring revenue is worth 7-15x. One-time revenue is worth 1-3x.
I could rant for hours on how absurd this is, but it’s better to just abuse it. You know mba and finance people are idiotically valuing revenue in this way. So game it.
They’re not.
The assumption is that the subscription will continue past the initial term for some % of users.
No, this is just wrong. Whoever came up with this theory has no idea what they’re talking about. If there’s a non-zero probability of the subscription not being canceled (more revenue) then yes, more revenue is good. Otherwise later revenue is bad, public or private. There is no exception to this.
I think you're are looking at this with a very narrow lens.
a) GM can remotely disable the car if the subscription isn't paid. So likelihood of abandonment is minimal.
b) more importantly, this takes $1500 off the sticker price, making GM cars more appealing when compared to Ford, BMW, etc. People who don't buy a GM car don't buy OnStar subscriptions at all... so just increasing the volume of subscriptions is the most important metric
c) 3 years/$1500 is just the minimum. People who have paid for 3 years are likely to keep paying in year 4, 5 and beyond. Totally different reaction than just starting a new monthly payment in month 37. And GM can add new features as upcharges to increase those payments in future years.
d) GM can use the recurring subscription creatively to roll owners into a new GM car. Think family plans where the 2nd sub costs less, or a % of future subscription payments are credited against the cost of a new vehicle.
Yes, obviously if you increase revenue and/or create new, valuable service opportunities, that’s more valuable. Merely changing the form of existing revenue: not valuable. Getting the same cash later: not valuable. So now we’re back at this point, which is perhaps obvious, that if you sell something with value, it could be valued by “Wall Street.” There is nothing counterintuitive or non-obvious worth pointing out here.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
There are a bag full of other tricks. Like - increasing subscription revenue, offsetting lost subscribers.
Wrong. If you increase revenue, that’s not the same as changing the form of the revenue (and delaying cashflow to boot). The comment suggests that the latter is more valuable. It is not.
> Does it have a root in reality?
Predictability. Recurring subscription revenue is drastically easier to forecast and plan cash flow around, and the financial models can be so much simpler to work with than non-transactional sales.
the idea is that you forget to unsubscribe and then pay much longer than 3 years
So once the three years is up they they start automatically billing you unless you cancel?
This is incorrect in theory and in practice. You have this reversed.
I'm going to guess it's because when you buy a car, you don't buy it from GM. You buy it from the dealer. That $1,500 option can become whatever inflated price the dealer puts it.
While if it's a subscription from GM, it's $1,500 and that $1,500 directly goes to GM.
Because the optics of a car company disabling a feature that was included with the car after three years unless you start paying for it and continue paying for it indefinitely are even worse.
Similar reasons to why things are priced at $x.99 or why car prices are often quoted in per-month payments or why mail-in rebates make you mail something in rather than just give you a discount. Or why the dealer doesn't even mention the mandatory "prep" charge until after you've shaken hands on the deal.
Perfectly rational people may factor everything in properly... but the world is woefully short of perfectly rational people.
They could do that and I'm sure they considered it. In the end, the consumer pays the same price. But I'm sure there are some internal accounting games going on. The $1500 is booked over the next three years, not all at once. So I'm guessing the accountants may have a plan.
I don't want to re-type the story here, but I had a "fun" time getting OnStar to cancel the demo service when I purchased my pickup several years ago. Story is in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816479#21826049).
The USA really needs better consumer protection laws. In my country that would clearly be an illegal bundled sale and illegal bait and switch. If you advertise product A for X amount, then a customer with X amount in their pocket should be allowed to walk out with product A, any deviation from that should be illegal.
(slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
Sales tax in the US is not a Value Added Tax, so putting just the post tax price on the sticker is not actually enough, the sticker would need the pre-tax price too, as some purchases can be exempt from sales tax.
Most VAT based countries have a single VAT rate for the whole country (or possible a country-wide set of rates for different types of products). The United States is not like that. Even if we consider an individual state as the equivalent to Country, each state does not have one consistent sales tax rate.
Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
That complicates things a lot. For example, if a law required the shown prices to include tax, it would mean that an online website cannot show you the price until you have entered your exact street address. Most people don't want to tell the website where they live just to find out a price that may not be any good.
The variable tax rate means that if the law applied to advertised prices shown on say TV, it would not be possible to have nationwide advertisements that show a price, or even statewide advertisements, or in some cases not even city-wide advertisements. (Unless they set a post-tax price based on what they can sustain with the highest tax rate, which means charging people in lower tax areas a higher price than they would otherwise have charged, just to be able to mention a price at all on TV). Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
Most people who want such post tax pricing laws would not be terribly happy with a law that allowed advertising a range like that.
I've heard this excuse, that tax situation is too complicated, and never understood it. The store knows to charge me the correct value, including all appropriate taxes, when I come to pay. So the data clearly is there, and therefore choosing not to show it to me up front is indeed bait-and-switch. They're telling me a price that is not going to be what they'll actually charge me.
It’s also a logistics thing. Since we also shop online. Store want online prices to match what’s seen in store and making the two match would be a nightmare and not reasonably viable.
On the other hand thing like cars really should have an all inclusive price sticker. They already have an itemized price sticker on the car so there is really nothing stoping these sellers from putting the remaining fees and taxes on there two as that should be consistent with the same dealer location and with such low inventory.
Given that most stores weren’t printing final price pre-internet, I highly doubt this is the reason. Though I do recall some really small convenience stores not getting the memo, but amongst them it isn’t/wasnt common
If displaying post tax prices is not required by law, then it is usually a competitive disadvantage.
People will see the post tax price, compare it in their head with the pre-tax price they saw at some other store, and feel like the post tax prices store is more expensive even if this store’s final price is actually slightly lower than the other store’s price.
Are you advocating requiring user registration with an address and login just to view products on an e-commerce site? I would dislike that far more than just knowing my sales tax rate is X% and to factor that in my head. I’d probably do significantly less online shopping if I had to register to see products.
Lots of possible solutions to that though, for unregistered users you could have an option to select sales tax % that would default based on location if you let the site access it. How many different sales tax rates actually exist in the US and how often do they change?
> How many different sales tax rates actually exist in the US and how often do they change?
Thousands. Every municipality in my area can have their own sales tax and can change them whenever they want. For Texas alone that's ~1,220 potentially different sales taxes which can change at any time. Its not an impossible to keep track of thing though, plenty of organizations do it and most payment processors will essentially handle it for you. But its not exactly easy, aggregating all that and getting it all right in the first place is a good bit of work.
Sounds crazy but ok!
Sure, I agree there are probably some half-useful middle ground solutions.
There are thousands of different sales tax rates in the US that change multiple times per year.
Each city, county, state and other things like metro transit districts, water districts and school districts can all contribute to the sales tax rate paid by an individual at the point of sale.
The answer to both is a lot. It’s not just state level but also county, municipal etc levels. Every month there are dozens and dozens of tax rate changes.
Everyone seems to manage with that just fine. There are literally hundreds of entities providing that service to merchants.
That’s not the topic of discussion though. They currently manage it fine because it’s done at point of sale. How would that work if you have to advertise the price including the sales tax?
They aren't charging you sales tax. The governement is, and they force the store into being their tax collector too.
It is a very important distinction.
Maybe. But have you ever considered stores that offer pick up vs. dine in options? In Ohio for instance, pick up orders of food of any kind aren't taxed, but dine-in is. So if you're at a fast food restaurant they can't magically change the prices on the menu to include tax just because they now know you're dining in.
> Unless the law allowed "between $x and $y depending on your local tax rate" (where X and Y are based on the lowest and highest tax rate for the advertising area).
What's wrong with this solution?
Getting rid of sales tax would be the best solution imo but complicated
Very complicated. Getting rid of consumption tax, means income tax is the sole source for citizen taxation.
To replace consumption tax, which ensures those with large savings, yet no income, still get taxed as they spend, you'd have to somehow have full disclosure of all assets, and tax that, along with all the privacy implications.
And just imagine all the work, with every citizen's assets being examined yearly.
Of course, there are other options, but not many which replace consumption tax.
There are many other taxes. There are tariffs, capital gains, or estate taxes, for example.
Additionally, not all consumption taxes are across-the-board sales taxes.
Across-the-board sales taxes are highly regressive taxes, because basic consumption needs are relatively flat across a population, so the poorest people pay a much higher percentage of their income in sales taxes than the wealthy.
The way that could be fixed is classifying goods and services into socio-economic class demand (A, B, C+, etc).
Here in Mexico we have something called the "canasta básica" (basic basket) which encompasses a set of goods that are defined as basic for living (they are 40 https://www.gob.mx/canastabasica unfortunately the list is in an image so not easy to google translate... stupid government pages). These are closely guarded by the government and I believe the price is closely protected.
Something like that could be extrapolated, and set different taxes to different goods and services. Like, (IMHO, please don't flame me) an XBOX should be heavily taxed, running shoes should be heavily taxed, a "gaming graphics card" should be heavily taxed. Same with services: "go cart racing" should be heavily taxed, Fast-food should be heavily taxed, while fixing stuff (fixing your blender, or your washing machine) should not.
It gets complicated. In New York, food and clothing is not taxable. The gotcha is “prepared food”, which is taxable.
For example, an unsliced bagel is food. A sliced to order bagel is prepared food and taxable. A system like you describe would be insanely complex.
Here’s NY guidance on when a sandwich is taxable: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/sandwi...
As insane as that is, I think it makes the sales tax more progressive, as poorer people spend a high proportion of income on food. I am always struck when I travel to a place like South Carolina, where the property taxes are low, but people with nothing are paying 9% sales taxes on food.
Yes, so here, Canada, we tend to make that flat sales tax more complex, so some groceries are excempt, some meals, etc.
Which makes it harder for people to know all the ins and outs of...
> Yes, so here, Canada, we tend to make that flat sales tax more complex, so some groceries are excempt, some meals, etc.
This is also the case in the US (varies state by state).
This seems like speculation not based in reality. Do Montana, Alaska, Oregon, Delaware, or New Hampshirite do this?
Alaska gets a lot of money from natural resources. New Hampshire gets a lot of money from property taxes. They do have sales tax on a few items, but call it something else (I think restaurants and hotels?). I don't know about the other states.
I don't know. They do still have federal sales tax I presume, and get kickbacks from the federal level for projects?
Some places may also benefit from high property tax, which now that I think of it, is a "holding" tax, not income tax.
There is no federal sales tax. If you go to a store in Delaware there is no sales tax of any kind charged.
Just to add another layer of complexity.
Many landlords and development companies add on percentage based fees. Some merchants will report these on recipes as PIF Tax (Property Improvement Fees). These are not a technically a tax, but impact the consumer the similarly
Even if you are tax exempt or buying non-taxable items like food, the property own still collects PIF.
PIFs are in the contract between the landlord and merchant the actual details of how fees work are not publicly know. Merchants may benefit from actual property improvements, or the fees are entirely a profit stream for the landlord.
I have never seen this- where have you seen it? I know some places pay a % of their sales to their landlord, but I have always seen that included in their advertised price.
I have seen it at a number of places in Colorado. The local supermarket I go to shows 1% PIF tax
In my state if I photograph a wedding and give the client a flash drive of the photos, I need to charge them sales tax on the entire wedding. If I just deliver the photos online, there’s no sales tax.
If they (or a family member) later purchase prints through their online gallery that are essentially drop shipped to them? Who the hell knows.
Stickers in Europe show both pre and post-tax prices. Online sales just charge you with the tax of their origin country. Anyway difficulty to advertise is no reason to not show real prices on in-store stickers.
With a car it is even more complicated, because the sales tax is based on the county you register it in - not the county that the dealership is in.
>Typically the state will have one rate, the county can have its own rate, the city its own rate, and potentially even special districts with their own sales tax rates.
There's a simple solution to this: stop doing this. Ban cities and districts from having their own sales taxes. There's no reason to allow this. In my country, there's a single national sales tax that's the same everywhere.
The US's problems are a result of its own stupid decisions.
My guess is that your country is much smaller than US (in both population and territory) and what’s more important have strong central government with only minor powers delegated to local authorities. That’s just not US where central government is responsible for fewer things and has strong local authorities that actually responsible for most things that you encounter day to say. (though unfirtunately central gov power is creeping up)
>though unfirtunately central gov power is creeping up
Nothing unfortunate about it: that decentralization is the cause of most of the problems.
I live in one of the few states in the US with no sales taxes. It boggles my mind when I go to a store in another state, and buy a $0.99 soda, and the total comes to $1.07. I have also never understood why the price isn't including the tax.
We had taxes bundled in the price for years in Canada. And it was changed to being separate and added on at the point of sale. The rationale given at the time, was that people should know the actual price of the things they're buying, and how much extra they're paying to support government. Essentially, the argument is that the cost of government shouldn't be invisible.
> Essentially, the argument is that the cost of government shouldn't be invisible.
Brazil went through the same thing, but took the (imo smarter) approach of describing the tax breakdown in the receipt
Everybody describes the tax breakdown in the receipt. The variance between countries is in the menu/catalog price scheme.
The tax breakdown on the receipt is usually because certain people are allowed to reclaim the tax if the goods are used for certain purposes.
Obviously, the be able to reclaim the tax, they need to know how much has been paid on the transaction.
Yes, and it also helps to reduce or prosecute fraud where a merchant charges for a tax that doesn't exist.
I've never seen a receipt for gas that explained how much tax I was paying on the purchase.
In Australia all prices include GST (equivalent of VAT) but invoices typically show how much the GST component is, which seems to achieve both goals. Plus everyone just knows GST is 10% and applies to almost everything except food and a few essentials. So there's no hiding the cost of government.
Intellectually, I know that you are correct. However, to this day, every time I buy something a bit pricey, the extra charge always feels a bit dear. That contemplation isn't as likely if you haven't already internalized the pre-tax price. So while, we both "know" the cost of government, people who every day have to face those calculations in a very tangible way, probably feel it more acutely.
Perhaps, but why's that an advantage?
For the same reason that being more aware of your personal spending, leads to better personal decisions. Out of sight, out of mind, is a recipe for less oversight and responsibility from decision makers.
Governmental spending can be a huge drag on the economy, and people may not realize just how much, unless they are personally confronted with the true scale of governmental intrusion. Many people today take it all as an unquestionable given, rather than as one choice among many.
And yet that is exactly how gasoline is sold across the country!
Gas prices change very frequently, so almost everyone uses a digital display to show the price... it is much easier to change 3 or 4 prices than to change thousands of labels when the tax changes.
If the argument is that the number of products and consequent ease of updating pricing to include taxes, then there are a huge group of items that should include tax in the quoted price. Admissions tickets to a movie or concert, flight prices, anything digital/online that can be updated immediately like gas prices, vehicles, etc.
In other words, I don’t think that argument holds.
Flight prices are generally displayed all-inclusive in the US.[0]
0: https://www.theflightexpert.com/all-in-ticket-prices-usdot-r...
They should also require stores that have adopted e-Ink price displays to do it
Yeah, that's one of the many benefits of living in New Hampshire. But what boggles my mind is why people in other states are willing to put up with sales tax at all. You're already being taxed on income. Its just the government double-dipping at that point.
Wait you live in a state with state income tax? I’m not sure why you’re willing to put up with that. You’re just being double taxed on your income.
Income tax is progressive; sales tax is regressive.
That is implementation specific. And oversimplified. An income tax is regressive if you only look within a tax bracket including the highest one which arguably contains the highest level of disparity within it (quantitatively, though perhaps not qualitatively). More so income tax on capital gains. Just the ability to have the majority of your income taxed as gains is regressive. Sales tax that are limited to luxury goods are progressive. Food assistance is often exempted from certain sales tax, which is progressive.
We can make either type of tax regressive, progressive, or vary by income level to push people toward the median lifestyle.
Implementation costs and the ease of avoidance should be larger concerns I think.
In Nevada there's no income tax, some sales tax, but the vast majority of taxable purchases are luxury purchases made by wealthy tourists and there's also a hotel room tax.
So in that one case, choosing sales tax isn't regressive.
I know and generally I agree with taxing income for this reason. “Double taxation” is a silly reason.
Agreed. Especially given the wide range of sales and income tax rates.
The double taxation criticism was about sales tax.
I know. Not only is it silly to call it a double tax, it’s also not even correct. Even in NH that money is taxed at least 3 other times before you spend it. Sales tax would be at least the 4th tax on the same money.
* Sales Tax
* Income Tax
* Property Tax
People in all states pay some combo of those 3. Some say no income tax (FL). But that means higher sales tax and property tax. Others have all 3 taxes, but in lower amounts.
Do you really think in New Hampshire you pay less total tax then someone like me, living in the Midwest? You likely do better than NY/Cali, but not the Midwest..
And for all practical purposes your social security is simply a tax as it goes into the exact same bucket as taxes.
True, though that is a federal tax. The 3 taxes I posted - I was referring to state and local level taxes.
Bragging about no sales tax while paying a higher income / property taxes was a pretty funny / American thing to do..
Tax laws are confusing and nonsensical everywhere.
Seems to me for local taxes land-value tax is clearly the most sensible. It aligns the intensives much better.
On state and federal level you can use flat or progressive income tax.
I don't understand why anybody would do sales or value added tax.
But recently I have been thinking if land-value tax for everything just didn't make sense.
So someone lives in a $400,000 RV in an RV park. They won't pay property tax. Say they are living inherieted money. They won't pay income tax. So sales tax would be their only tax.
Obviously this is a cherry picked example and can't represent but .1% of the population. But each lever you pull for tax rewards/punishes a different group. A famous example if FL has no income tax, letting retirees stretch their fixed pensions further.
In general, if a state has a lot of tourists coming to it. They won't get property tax nor income tax on the visitors, but they WILL get sales tax. So it makes sense to raise the sales tax, so that you can lower the property / income tax for people that live there yearround.
The RV park would pay land value tax and that would be financed by the rend of the RV park.
Tourists will make some locations more valuable then others, so it should have an impact on property tax.
We in Ohio also have literally all 3 at the same time.
I'd rather not deal with sales tax, gets annoying sometimes with cash.
Sales tax and income tax serve different purposes in most countries. And very little of that purpose is actually "raising" revenue - the federal government can in principle always print whatever money it needs and hand it out to states etc. But they do help ensure the fiat currency has irreplaceable value, that there's not excessive money in the system, and for income taxes also help smooth out inequalities. And it's often simpler or less fraught for state-level taxes to be used to supplement revenue raising rather than rely on federal government hand outs.
Lots of states have no income tax
Nine states have no personal income tax. Of those, South Dakota and Wyoming are the only states that don't have business income taxes. So, only those two states have no income tax.
The sales tax rate can change (sometimes from city to city). It is easier to keep track at the register than it is to keep track in the aisles. That's my best guess.
The sales price can change at each store location. It would be even easier to put the full price on the item in the aisle. Stores now know their inventory and track it by the minute.
I've always thought that it's probably done to engender anger at the notion of sales taxes by making the difference much clearer than it is in other places where the prices are typically bundled, and to display a lower price than the consumer is expected to pay.
Not displaying the taxes is infuriating when visiting other places, since unless you look up all of the applicable taxes you're effectively just guessing at the cost of anything.
I think originally there may have been some "grumble why do we have to charge" but I feel much of it now is big stores wanting to advertise one price for the whole country as best they can - and "tax licensing and dock fees" is a way to get around the varying prices.
Tax is based on the consumer’s address. Technically, the price for you is $0.99.
edit: you can get a refund on the state’s portion of the sales tax, but not the city. (ex. WA state form https://dor.wa.gov/file-pay-taxes/apply-tax-refund/state-sal...).
It is based on where the item is sold if you go to a physical store like in the example.
Technically, it's the place of provision.
So in-store vs delivery, or online event vs in-person, etc.
Most entertaining: where I live, we have to charge the client's tax rate if it's consulting work, but our provincial tax rate if it's hosting.
Which is not necessarily where the car and the window sticker is, if we circle back to the root comment.
So either you’re in Alaska or you’re paying a state income tax on top of your federal income tax. They always get you somewhere!
You can try living/working in Vancouver WA and doing all your shopping in Oregon. But you technically have to report and pay use taxes.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. WA has crazy high car registration fees/tax so if someone wants to optimize this they need to drive a cheap car to decrease the burden
King county does, I’m sure Clark county is more reasonable.
While I like the idea of having the tax shown on the price tags... tax rates change a lot in most places in the US. The cost to change all the price tags in a store everytime the rate changes, and to do it overnight, would be crazy. Maybe once everyone uses digital eink price labels...
How often are you talking? More often than price fluctuations due to inflation? (fair bit of that recently!)
Price fluctuations aren't usually every item in the store at the same time. Sales taxes change several times a year in my locality.
Wow, that sounds crazy, remind me not to move there.
The price of the soda is $0.99, so that's the advertised price.
When you negotiate salary with a new employer, do you include the employer paid Social Security and Medicare taxes? Do you say I require $100,000 or $107,650 (Social Security is $6,200, Medicare is $1,450)?
In my experience in casual conversation all Americans say their salary as pre-tax, and in Europe it's more split where many people would say their salary is the post-tax amount.
How on earth is this related to consumer protection? It's not as if they are forcing this retroactively. They're just increasing the price for a car by $1500 and including more functionality.
They are a free enterprise that can offer whichever products at whatever prices they want. And consumers are free to vote with their wallets.
> They're just increasing the price for a car by $1500 and including more functionality
From TFA, they're advertising the vehicle's MSRP without the extra $1500 cost, and that extra $1500 is not optional when you go to actually buy one.
No from TFA they’re breaking it out as a separate line item. We can debate that all you like, but it’s not as if they’re just lying about the cost, or charging people more after the fact.
When you go to sign the dotted line, the price includes this charge. If you don’t like it, don’t sign.
Its frightening how many people think we need the government to regulate the most minute details of everything. Vote with your dollar, period, that is the only way the right feedback gets to the right issues.
It's hard to vote with your dollar if the company can lie to you about the price. Sure in this case you'll find out the actual cost eventually but at a point where changing your vote is much harder (maybe a deposit has already been collected, credit check run, the other car you were considering has been sold etc)
So are they lying or will you eventually find out the cost?
Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
> So are they lying or will you eventually find out the cost?
Yes.
This is the kind of deception that starts early on in the process to get you to narrow down your car selection by deceiving you on the actual price of the car.
> Buying a car is not the hardest feat by any stretch imaginable. If you’ve put down a deposit, you will have seen the all in cost. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
It's not hard, but it's definitely not pleasant, and the the auto makers and dealers can do some slimy practices. The parent comment I was replying to seemed to conflate auto makers should not be allowed to advertise an inaccurate MSRP with over-regulation. Also you are not 100% correct about deposits, just ask Bronco reservation holders who put down deposits with dealers for reservations, that later got turned into orders, that when the car arrived had thousands of dollars of surprise "ADM" (Additional Dealer Markup in Ford lingo) added to the buy sheet.
"The price shown should be the price paid" is not a "minute detail" it's like the fundamental basis of advertising.
What's frightening is how many people believe in the myth of the free market of rational consumers.
Rent seeking happens precisely because voting with your dollar doesn't work well. "Vote with your dollar" is a platitude based on an oversimplified model of the economy.
Is the cost of living in your country, on average, higher or lower than in the United States?
As far as I can tell there are a vanishingly small number of problems where "new laws" are the optimal answer. Increased regulatory oversight generally leads to ossified markets with higher costs. Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
In this case, there are multiple car manufacturers available to Americans from around the world - if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour. That seems like a more responsive mechanism than piling on new regulation to dictate which types of fees are okay and which aren't.
> Many of the most reviled monopolies throughout American history got there in no small measure because of government protection in the form of "regulation".
This is simply not true. The common reviled monopoly strategies include price fixing, collusion, natural monopolies, markets with high barriers to entry, network effects, and others in addition to regulatory capture. Regulations that contribute to monopolistic tendencies are "vanishingly small" in number, you just hear about them a lot because people don't like them.
> if this makes GM vehicles more expensive or causes a consumer backlash that damages sales, GM will change their behaviour.
It may be time to walk through history and see all the dark patterns that were solved by regulation. Before the EPA, it was common for manufacturing companies to dump industrial waste directly into rivers, for example.
Consumers only have so much energy for backlash, and your theoretical system requires everyone to have an encyclopedic memory of all the shitty things that every company does and weigh all of that in their minds when making consumer choices. It's impractical and impossible. Regulatory agencies are a much better system and that's why every modern economy depends on them.
I’d add that recent deregulation (energy markets) & pre-regulation (like cryptocurrency) show that companies are remarkably fast & consistent in enacting proven, exploitive models.
The idea that regulation is a burden on society is fanciful. What is burdensome is regulations that cannot be readily adapted. Unfortunately, popular myths like “regulation bad” is part of the reason regulators stay with policies they would much rather propose updating. Veteran regulators are quite eager to improve their frameworks. It is “politics” that prevents their evolution.
> Consumers only have so much energy for backlash, and your theoretical system requires everyone to have an encyclopedic memory of all the shitty things that every company does and weigh all of that in their minds when making consumer choices.
Hey, uh, there's this thing called Google - most people start there when they're making a big-ticket purchase like a car. Or you could pay for Consumer Reports to get expert-level analysis. Or you can just ask people on the relevant subreddit.
Consumers have access to more information to inform buying decisions than at any point in history. So unless General Motors is the only car manufacturer in the world, people can weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions. More intervention from government is totally unnecessary and likely even harmful in the form of generally higher prices.
> That seems like a more responsive mechanism
It clearly isn't. The power and knowledge asymmetry between producers and consumers is such that most producers can get away with abhorrent behaviour pretty much all the time with no significant repercussions. That's why boycotts don't work, among other things.
While I agree this would be ideal, actual prices on cars actually wouldn't be possible in the US. For many (most?) states, for cars/trucks, you pay sales tax based on where you LIVE not where you purchased the car so the price would be different per buyer.
Also, for most cars, paying sticker would be a rip off anyway. Unless there is a shortage going on, no one expects to pay sticker price.
> (slightly off topic, but in my country consumer laws also mandate that sticker and advertised prices must be the final price including all taxes. The standard USA practice of stickers/adverts with pre-tax price is also absurdly anti-consumer).
How does that work when advertising in media that is available in more than one country, such as broadcasts of major international sporting events?
Where do you live and is Apple's bundling of iCloud (you can only use some major features like the App Store when signed in & you can't choose other providers to fullfil the same role) illegal there too?
They haven't specifally addressed App Store + iCloud bundling...
Because they have been specifically targeting iPhone + App Store bundling: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22996248/apple-sideloadin...
The US has antitrust law prohibiting bundling as well.
> The USA really needs better consumer protection laws.
I feel like we used to. Everything is so overtly nickle and dime the working class now.
Completely agree. A related question would be how does lobbying work in your country?
The practice of not including sales taxes allows the government to raise sales tax without it impacting the inflation charts, and citizens recognizing the full impact to their wallet.
Government gets more money this way
Why, then, do most US states have such laughably low sales tax rates, compared to e.g. the EU?
I don’t agree with the person you replied to but the answer to your question is:
Because the US collects taxes very differently, so you can never make a fair comparison between identical tax categories.
Just look at the gasoline tax differences between the two. The core purpose of that tax and what it’s used to fund varies dramatically between the two regions. So, naturally the amount being taxed would be different.
Also, The US govt tends to have taxes below the rates needed to operate (US has a higher deficit), so the taxes will more likely be lower by comparison.
And a side note, as many EU residents constantly remind us in North America.
We drive greater distances here. More rural miles. More highway miles.
Rural driving (constant 50mph with no stop and start of lights for an hour or more), is far less damaging to roads than start and stop traffic. Interstate miles are the same concept.
Beyond that, expanding and building roads, is cheaper in rural areas.
So there may actually be more gas tax collected per repair cost, even with the rate lower in the US.
Canada has higher gas tax than the US, but lower than the EU. But we also have cold weather everywhere, with frost and ice destroying roads.
So on average, we need more than the US, which only has a few northern/cold states.
The EU doesn't have a sales tax. They have a VAT which is a tax on net income not sales.
From the point of view of the consumer what's the difference? An item that is listed for price P online in the US costs a US buyer P x (1 + s) where s is the sales tax rate and costs an EU buyer P x (1 + v) where v is the VAT rate.
As far as I can see the differences are in what happens on the retailer's supply side. In the US generally there won't be sales tax on the supplier's sale of goods to the retailer. In the EU there might be VAT on those, but the retailer might get to deduct the VAT they pay when they are remitting the VAT they collect.
The net result in both systems is that the consumer pays all of the sales tax or VAT. In the US system the government doesn't see any of that until the final sale to the consumer. In the EU, entities up the supply chain pay part of it but get it back later via deductions so in effect VAT for those entities is a loan to the government which the government pays back from the VAT consumers pay.
For the consumer not much difference. For comparing tax levels it makes a big difference. VAT is a tax on all the steps in the manufacturing & sales process. Sales tax is a tax on the last step alone.
You're trading programs for taxes. All those free benefits of society have to get money from somewhere.
It’s more that we shift where things are taxed (lower sales taxes are made up for with higher property taxes, etc.). Americans pay similar amounts to Europeans when you look at taxes + health insurance but we get less because of politically-mandated inefficiency.
Source for similar amounts? Median disposable income is way higher in the US.
It depends on what you’re measuring and especially what income levels but https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myt... gives you the general idea of what to look for.
In general, Americans pay less in total taxes but we give that back with much greater expenses for things like healthcare & drug costs, retirement, education, etc. At the top end that works out in your favor but there’s no equivalent for things like our rates of medical bankruptcy for everyone below the highest income levels.
But the USA is #10 in the world in welfare spending per capita. Even beating out a few countries commonly called "welfare states" like the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
Because most US states also have income tax.
That's not it. EU countries have income tax.
As does the EU. So that doesn't explain it.
At this point I am really wondering when massive shift to bikes/cargo bikes will happen?
Like... it needs NO fuel or can be charged at home for electric ones, companies literally can't offer other subscription services aside from "free repair" for x$ a month, because bicycle is too simple... Maybe battery leasing, idk...?
It doesn't need driver license to operate, if infrastructure is good, it can be much faster in the city and you don't need to pay a ton of taxes, in many situations you can repair it by yourself With electric cargo bikes/bakfiets a big chunk of car use-cases is gone, like buying groceries, moving light-medium objects, even take childs to school. For other 5% of use-cases, people can like... rent a car for a day or take taxi... I can't imagine how cheap this could be
And for people that can't use them, there are tricycles, carts or duofiets Aaaaaand you can add a small bicycle trailer at the back, increasing further total capacity.
Of course all this is possible with protected bike lanes AND at least decent public transport like buses AND bike parking. Car drivers will drive without encountering bicyclists and vice-versa, everyone happy, everyone safe, much less stress
I can see why. Cycling in Europe is fantastic, but cycling in North America is terrifying.
I have a car and a motorcycle, but German bike routes are so nice that I still prefer the bike. I bike from the outskirts to the centre of Berlin on a dedicated bike path in nature. It's awesome!
Canada has few such routes. You have to fight for a place on a wide, ugly boulevard lined with box stores, and the drivers take personal offence to your existence.
yep, i can only imagine... I went recently to Switzerland... oh god, so many bikes, dedicated lanes, a ton of parking places inside and outside of buildings. I can imagine myself biking there, but where I live... it is still possible, but much harder(at least for now, but there are plans for improvement)
EightSleep has a subscription service for a mattress. Bike companies will find a way, and consumers will gobble it up because we have no self control.
Many electric bikes are supposed to go back to the shop for maintenance once a year. If you lease the bike this often becomes mandatory. Also more and more manufacturers lock down the electronics and battery systems so nobody can really work on their own bike, at least those drivetrain parts.
I waited a whole year to bring my electric bike in and my maintenance bill was $300+. The higher speed and braking energy puts a lot of wear on the components. After that I learned how to do maintenance myself to save some money but I warn people considering an e-bike that maintenance costs will be non-trivial.
"GM gives customers no choice to opt out of a $1500 subscription, leaving them with an easy choice to opt out of the brand entirely"
Requiring some ongoing subscription service for fundamental features will eventually be the status quo across the entire industry. There's simply too much money on the table to give up.
In this case GM has taken the perplexing case of front loading the requirement at the initial purchase, but I suspect that it was easier and quicker to implement as a pseudo MSRP bait-and-switch increase than to create a more fleshed out scheme like we see with Toyota and BMW.
> fundamental features
Fundamental features of a car are things like engine and tires.
A mandatory tracking service is fundamental to an open air prison.
A product so valuable GM is now literally FORCING people to buy it. If I'm thinking correctly Car Play negates the need for anything OnStar does (that you might actually care about).
> Car Play negates the need for anything OnStar does
I'm no fan of OnStar or forced subs. But can Car Play call 911 or the police if you are unconscious after a crash? Or prevent your car from being driven if you report it as stolen?
> But can Car Play call 911 or the police if you are unconscious after a crash?
Crash detection isn't a thing in phones generally, but it's worth noting that all cellular devices, regardless of subscription/service status, can call 911 (even without a sim card). You don't need some subscription payment to do that.
Maybe not generally, but it's starting to be a thing https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7055029?hl=en
> You don't need some subscription payment to do that.
You do if you're not conscious
How many roads with no passersby still have cell coverage? How many of them allow for speeds great enough to knock you unconscious on impact?
> speeds great enough
If you aren't wearing a seatbelt (admittedly, a bad idea), very close to 100% of them.
As if I needed a reason to continue to avoid GM vehicles. I wish I wanted one.
> GM is now literally FORCING people to buy it.
I don’t mean to be pedantic but…they’re not forcing you to buy this any more than they’re forcing you to buy the rest of the car. You could always just buy a Ford instead.
“By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
That's some slick words for "Get people to pay for shit they don't want".
And in related news the value of old cars has never been higher. Government Motors can keep their junk cars and bundled spying service.
“By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it helps to provide a more seamless onboarding experience and more customer value,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told Automotive News in an email.
What nauseating corporate speak. I'll translate:
"We are forcing this grabage on our customers so we can drive up the price and remove their ability to opt out of our tracking and spying service," -- which is primed to be used to track driver movements and 'carbon' use (Lol!) and rat back to the nanny state. Just like every electric car.
When I had a vehicle with OnStar, I located where its antennae connected to the controller and disconnected it. The vehicle was fine, nothing else was impacted. It just couldn't communicate with anything anymore.
I originally removed the power, but then most of the "smarter" electronics stopped working.
A hardware toggle provided by the manufacturer would be a lot more respectful of the customer. That sort of respect would even get some subscriptions out of it. But that probably goes against the long term strategy for most places - that connection is for more, later.
How hard was it to disconnect, out of curiosity. Not asking for anything identifying, just wondering if it required removing panels or was just a matter of reaching an arm in the right spot.
Nice to know it can be done without anything too drastic.
"I've cut the antennas out of hardware that is part of a subscription software package I'm still paying for"
On Star is both equipment and a subscription to use it. They mean the vehicle was equipped... with the equipment. Not that they were paying for the subscription. The "mandatory" subscription is a new announcement, and does not apply to previously purchased vehicles.
Onstar remains connected (but paywalled) even when you don’t pay.
Why not write a reply with your voice instead of just trying to rephrase what they said?
They're not.
They're quite obviously pointing out that cutting the antenna does nothing about the fact that the subscription is still bundled and active.
As the other two comments point out, you can have the equipment without the software activated. So their guess/"quote" makes an incorrect assumption.
So, what value does it add? It seems to simply exist to make an assumption that makes the other HNer look bad.
This thread is about GM forcibly bundling OnStar into a bunch of their cars. Removing the antenna does nothing to prevent that.
Whether you activate the subscription or not, you're still paying $1500 for it.
Their story doesn't really apply here. Fair enough.
My issue is more with 4chan greentext being a low form of communication.
Almost anything is better than it, like "Well, you'd still be paying the subscription." Even direct snark feels higher level than greentext-style rephrasing.
The problem is that you can disconnect the antenna, but you'll still be billed $1500 for the subscription, regardless of whether you use it or not.
And the mandatory subscription for car services have arrived.
Good, go out of business GM.
GM doesn't and never will "go out of business" as long as the USA remains a viable nation-state with military needs and financial ability to bail them out.
In that case the US government should metaphorically grow some balls and buy it out next time they need a bailout.
They can't do that, that's "socialism".
It's not socialism if it's not state-owned! We're just bailing them out because, uh, Jobs! Economy! Profit! Freedom!
Unfortunately I feel it is inevitable. They've seen the benefits of it for software and services, particularly for things low on the list of "stuff I can give up in a down economy" and want that revenue and control over the secondary sale market.
I'd be shocked if there weren't mandatory subs for all cars in the next 5yrs, and potentially even one time use or limited use IAPs and in your face promotions for them through car UIs.
It will be gradual while there is competition here, but I suspect they are watching the mobile app and gaming industry quite closely.
Unfortunately, the others will likely do the same.
Did you see the BMW subscription seat's addon?
As ridiculous as that is, it's not on the same level as GMC's mandatory subscription.
Cross posting from the other thread:
I ended up calling and having OnStar cancel my "trial" in my 2018 era truck in 2019, to the point I instructed them to disable the OnStar lights on the mirror and everything. This was a task as they're very annoying and persistent...
Once that was done I originally pulled the daughterboard housing the entire modem but this bricked my compass and GPS. To keep those working I ended up altering the modem itself with a soldering iron per the pdf posted here:
https://www.chevybolt.org/threads/internet-without-onstar-wi...
The guy there on that forum did so in an effort to use your own sim with the HMI, but using 0 ohm resistors or just solder bridging the relevant connections is enough to prevent my vehicle from getting online, but leaves the GPS intact. You can test by trying to make phone/onstar/data related actions - it just won't work.
Another good measure is to remove one of the antenna leads, I forget which one is cellular primary, but the other is more GPS/aux. Doing it all this way allows you to still connect your vehicle to wifi should you so desire to, for updates and such.
There are other secrets and tricks to these things, including a git repo I cloned that is now gone from the public internet, where a guy figured out how to solder an EMMC reader to a few points on the mainboard to get and modify the filesystem.
Edit: here's a mirror https://repo.or.cz/bosch_hmi_hacking.git
They really go out of their way to keep you from owning your vehicle.
Also bought a device that lets me plug HDMI inputs into the truck, unfortunately some kind of refresh rate or resolution issue prevents it from working properly.
As an aside, if you bought and financed through GM, they may have attached a secondary GPS/cell tracker to your OBD2 port, and used sticky tape to hide it somewhere - make sure to remove that once you're not financed through them as well (it is illegal to do so I believe before using alternative financing or paying it off).
This has got to be a big competitive disadvantage, unless a lot of consumers cave at the dealership... or all the competitors pick up the same tactic.
If you're comparing a GM vehicle to its competitor, you will not see price parity, as this $1500 "option" will show up on inventory web sites as part of the price (it already does now).
In general, I don't want companies to fail, but I certainly want to see this strategy fail horribly.
The automotive industry is huge because U.S. infrastructure demands having a car, and also because everyone wants to buy "just the right car" for themselves. But these GM luxury brands might struggle with a big price hike like this.
unless a lot of consumers cave at the dealership
And, they will.
It was explained to me by a advertising buyer at a big regional auto dealership chain that the reason that auto dealers try so hard to get you onto their lot first is that in the vast vast vast majority of cases, if someone shows up in person, they're going to buy one of your cars. It's just up to the salesperson to figure out which one.
He said the very small percentage of people who go from lot to lot are the sort of people who aren't worth the effort, anyway. Which, coincidentally, sounds very much like how the tech industry dismisses "edge cases" and people who need customer service because they aren't efficient and don't "maximize shareholder value."
A large part of selling cars is about the brand, the brand's social image, and what owning a car of a particular brand means to the owner. It's why there are so many brand-loyal car clubs. It's why you find debutantes who only want BMWs. It why you find Appalachian dirt farmer who say "I only buy Chevy." If someone wants a Cadillac, they'll pay the extra $1,500 and pretend it doesn't exist because it's just $25/month hidden in a five-year contract.
Personally, I've owned all kinds of cars. More than once when considering a new car, my co-workers have offered their advice. No matter who it was, the advice was always rooted in the same kind of jingoistic tribalism that infects politics and is the basis of professional sports. My brand is better than someone else's brand. Facts be damned. Here's my wallet.
> He said the very small percentage of people who go from lot to lot are the sort of people who aren't worth the effort, anyway.
But they still have to decide what type each particular person is. I usually play an ignorant buyer for a bit, make them think the sale is about to go through, then walk out unless they give me deal. Buying a car doesn’t happen often so when I do it, I don’t mind spending some time to get what I want. I don’t enjoy the process, it would be nice to just order it online, but since it’s not possible gotta play the game I guess.
At least my parents and I are the kind of people who aren't worth a salesman's time. Means we can look around for longer without them bothering us.
This is a tangent and I know there’s already a front page story on it but still couldn’t resist.
By God the cars in the US are huge. About a decade or so back mostly pick ups were kinda big but now looks like the default size is pick up and it only gets bigger from there. Even Tesla model 3 for that matter is huge by Indian standards.
I find it super frustrating. There's been leaps forward in fuel efficiency, but car manufacturers compensate by making trucks and SUVs bigger and heavier. The newer trucks can fit a third adult in the front seat comfortably. I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.
> I hope the Ford Maverick is successful enough that more manufacturers start making "little" trucks again.
You hit the nail on the head. Manufacturers aren't forcing anybody to buy big trucks. They respond to demand. If people show enough demand for a tiny pickup like the Maverick, we'll see competition in the space.
Demand is partially driven by cheap gas. Cheap gas is subsidized by all kind of benefits provided to oil manufacturers, US international policy (ie: military), removing negative externality (increased insurance rate due to global warming) etc.
So I'd say that this is an artificial demand that is driven by policy. If people paid the "true" price of this worldwide oil infrascture, I'd likely be more expensive and big trucks would not be chosen just to move your family around.
If gas wasn't so cheap, more likely the price of trucks would come down to compensate and the same number of units would roll off the lot. GM makes nearly $20,000 in profit on the sale of a truck. For comparison, a Chevy Trax barely sells for $20,000 out the door. The margins on trucks are huge.
It's a tough situation for buyers. I'd rather have a car 90% of the time, for a lot of reasons, but I legitimately need a truck 10% of the time. A car cannot become a poor truck, but a truck can become a poor car, and so the truck wins.
Another way to say that would be 'demand is not artificially constrained by expensive gas.' People want trucks, and the price of gas is not making them change their mind. The electric F150 will probably be sold out at MSRP for years
I mean you're welcome to buy a GM Chevy Spark which is a 4 seater hatchback for like $20k...If customers wanted small cars, they'd build more small cars.
Lots of open space, people choose comfortable cars. Pickups are a little bit bigger now, and they have taken over the role of the land yachts from decades past. I mean, look at the back seat space in an F150. Can't touch that in any sedan, even a full size. No wonder people like them for family cars.
I've been in enough traffic in Hyderabad that I can appreciate why nobody drives a big car there. Different situation.
The U.S. built wide roads in order to be tolerant to the small mistakes people make while driving. It’s called “forgiving design.” Planners were not expecting auto makers to inflate their vehicles to the larger lane width.
A modern F150 is 80 inches wide. ~50 years ago, the F100 was 78 inches wide. Not much change there. The legal limit is 96 inches, and has been since the 1950s.
Even rich people drive small cars in Amsterdam. But America is big and empty so plenty of space for everyone to drive a bus.
Part of the reason is that road engineers basically adopted a standard that treated all roads the same as highways in terms of buffer zones and so on.
So they treat a 2 lane road in suburb the same as a highway. Literally.
So you end up with local roads that can fit 4 SUV next to each other despite being like a 2 lane road.
Literally everything is built to accommodate huge cars and even has safety margin for huge cars.
Its actually funny, go to google maps and compare car subburbs from the 50s with those from the 80/90s and you will see the roads being like twice the size. And then you compare it to old street car subburbs and the roads are even thinner.
Ironically those street car subburbs often have population density that make them almost city like.
This all works together to make US style sprawl such a distinctive feature.
In my area its the 1950's and 60's suburbs that started to have enormous streets between houses, like 6 vehicles wide. I have always been curious why this was done.
You can read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town". I have not read it yet but Charles Marohn talks about this a lot.
Basically they just developed road safety principles for highways and then somehow thought it made sense for all roads no matter if there were people there.
There are cultural and legal reasons.
One legal reason is fuel economy regulations (CAFE standards) encourage car makers to make their cars large enough to be classified as "light trucks", leading to less stringent fuel economy standards.
A larger footprint also reduces the fuel economy standard, incentivizing larger vehicles.
See: https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-ar...
If a truck or a van is big that seems reasonable to me. What really gets me is how stuff like the Mini. Park a BMW Mini next to a BMC Mini and the modern mini looks like a SUV. Buying cars that comfortably fit in "compact only" spaces in the city is getting harder every year.
It's partially safety. There is a minimum weight for road traction that's observed. It's not larger than an Accord, but certainly a classic Fiat 500 could never be made again.
Mostly it's the automobile as a status symbol.
Bigger is better according to lizard brain.
Its not lizzard brain, a larger car is objectively more useful if the environment is build for large cars.
Big roads, big cars.
There also seems to be some social expectation that when you have a family, you need a bigger car, despite modestly-sized cars being perfectly sufficient.
The market has spoken :)
US consumers seem to be in an abusive relationship with traditional car companies.
I've heard that the latest thing is that when buying a car from a dealer you have to sign over power of attorney to them. Insane.
Fortunately since they don't have dealers Tesla manages to be an exception to this power of attorney stuff; not needed or asked for, nothing even remotely close. Also they only charge $100 / year (totally optional) for LTE connectivity. And their mobile service including emergency roadside assistance is dirt cheap. Who would pay $1,500 for OnStar?
The power of attorney thing has been standard practice for ages. It's a limited power of attorney that just lets the dealership submit paperwork to the DMV & bank on your behalf. Nothing sketchy about it.
But it was Tesla that introduced this whole "software as a service" subscription thing in the auto industry.
> US consumers seem to be in an abusive relationship with traditional car companies.
...and ISPs, and retail banks, and apartment buildings, and ride-sharing services, and airlines...
It's not broken; it's working as designed.
https://www.onstar.com/us/en/user_terms
> 26. Data Collection / Privacy. GM collects, uses, and shares information from and about You and your Vehicle. The GM Privacy Statement describes what GM does with that information. You consent to the collection, use, and sharing of information described in the Privacy Statement and in any revisions to the Privacy Statement, which may be modified as described in that document.
https://www.gm.com/privacy-statement
> We may collect information about you and your vehicle, such as name, address, email address, phone number, vehicle identification number (VIN) and vehicle performance data ...
> We may share your information ... with our business partners.
With OnStar, they now to track where you drive, how fast you drive, how you accelerate & brake, where you shop & eat, which friends you visit, what apps you use (over wifi), whether you text while driving, and what you listen to (over bluetooth). The value of this data is probably at least $20/mo per vehicle. GM probably sells this data directly to LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom) and other tracking companies.
I used to have the similar service on a 2016 Volvo station wagon.
But the radio module in that car is 3G, and because carriers have been discontinuing 3G Volvo cannot provide their service to my car.
There was roughly 12 months when it was impossible to upgrade the radio in my older model car. Now the radio upgrade is customer-paid and optional.
My point being, if they require the subscription I’d be careful to confirm the service is guaranteed regardless of the carriers and obsolete radios etc.
GM customers must buy from another company to avoid subscription fees?
"I'm ready to sign! So how long can I expect this truck to serve me?"
"National average is about 12 years"
"Great so $1500 for 3 years is $6000, that's the stealth price hike. Take it off or give me a $6,000 discount."
Also being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32425208
I am a little surprised how much press this is getting. They are just hiding an MSRP bump in a mandatory 'option'. A bit of an oxymoron for sure. They're not the first manufacturer to pull this stunt, for sure. RV manufacturers, for example, do exactly the same thing but on a far grander scale.
I don't think OnStar is the noteworthy part. They've been putting OnStar on all their vehicles for years.
it's more than just a price increase. it's a sky-rocketed, mandatory maintenance cost increase.
The buried lede is that it's a three year subscription. Apparently OnStar is $500 a year?! For what amounts to a screen with a modem? Good grief.
The subscription is for the service, not the hardware.
What features of the OnStar service cost anywhere near $40/month to provide? Your phone does almost all of that for free already. The only sustaining cost is the mobile traffic. (For reference, Tesla's "premium connectivity" feature that provides YouTube and satellite imagery and remote camera streams and such is $10/month).
GM gives customers no choice but to buy from another manufacturer to avoid subscription fees?
Although I'm sure that won't last long either.
How much longer until buying a new non-subscription car becomes like buying a new non-smart TV?
There is some modularity there at least, I just got a fire tv for pretty cheap, but I never plan on letting it connect to the internet, instead I have a separate box which connects to my streaming apps. I feel like the situation with cara is worse.
On star and subscription services has been available for my whole life (35 years).
But there have always been alternatives without subscription services available. What would cause a change for alternatives to stop being available?
Even if there was no benefit from the data collected by the system to the manufacturer, they might still make it a default just because there are supply chain advantages to having a single unique design (with all the hardware & software for the "connected" bit) than maintaining a separate, non-connected SKU.
But of course manufacturers also benefit from the data collection and functionality the "connected" bit offers such as DRM, etc, so why wouldn't they mandate it?
These are trusts. Other companies will start doing the same thing, then you won't have a choice. Buying a dumb truck will be like buying a dumb tv.
People seem to forget that competition in the way that we talk about when we talk about the free market only really occurs with people who want to upset the established order. When you have a group of long established manufacturers who, broadly speaking, are happy with how the land is divided up you start to see innovations like this one where it raises the profits for all firms. Because you don’t want to risk being a defector and creating a race to the bottom when you can all be fat and happy.
Aslong as there are production issues in general they might get away with it.
Smart people would be contacting their state legislators to ban this. Complaining on hacker news won't accomplish much.
Thankfully, doing one of those things doesn't stop you from doing the other!
So what happens when you sell this car or buy one used? Who's on the hook for the subscription?
This is yet another reason to stop buying from GM … and the regulator should step in.
Pre internet-enabled vehicles are going to be the new gold.
IMO the best vehicles are ones from the early to mid 2000's. They have OBD2 so they're easy to diagnose and tune but no unnecessary computer controls in everything, no touchscreens, parts are plentiful, issues are well known, and they're better built than earlier cars.
The only way I'm giving up mine is after I either drive it into the ground or crash it. I would love a more environmentally friendly vehicle but not at the expense of my ability to actually own things.
Depending on where you live, legislation will also eventually ban you from driving inside cities using ICE cars older than 10 years.
>inside cities
And nothing was lost.
Is there any built in navigation in a car that can compete in ease of use and frequency of updates with a phone/tablet app?
I got onstar with my Yukon, the subscription lapsed because I never sent them any money. The wifi hotspot though, I'm paying for that.
Boggle me. If I ever buy a car, I’m either gonna be so rich I’ll buy an Ferrari, or just buy a 90s fiat wagon.
For now I’ll stick to my motorcycle.
All these companies have gotten so fatted, full of a bunch of MBA jackasses with their excel sheets and bonuses.
Do they actually give a damn about building cars people want, rather than squeezing another penny out of consumers to make wall street happy and increase their bonuses?
While there's plenty to complain about with Tesla, they're the first company to have their kind of success (in the US at least) coming out of nowhere.
We need more like that. Tesla also needs actual competition since they've been stagnating a lot.
> Do they actually give a damn about building cars people want, rather than squeezing another penny out of consumers to make wall street happy and increase their bonuses?
No, of course not and that’s totally rational for them. Being mad at people for system’s problem is like being mad at a river for following the slope of the land. You don’t curse the river for destroying your house during high tide, you build a dam.
If the river had free will, I would absolutely be mad at the river.
Ya know what, poor phrasing. You're allowed to be mad at whatever you want. Just don't expect it to do anything so long as the incentives that pushed them to this decision in the first place haven't changed.
It's pretty established that GM stopped selling cars to the discerning value focused customer years ago.
They're in it for the MBAs, and the truck/V8/admittedly luxury interiors buyers who GM does a passable job for.
Not sure they have many legs to stand on.
> It's pretty established that GM stopped selling cars to the discerning value focused customer years ago.
Eh, GM makes the Bolt. That is hard to beat on TCO.
Car companies slowly realizing they can be leasing companies that produce their own vehicle fleet :)
I never should have sold my 89 Caprice... actually buttons, paperclip diagnostics, couches for seats...
prediction -- round II of this leap of technology -- uniformed services and corporate employees get financial incentives, subsidies and "valuable network services" while those outside of that system pay increased costs and have fewer choices for repair and upgrades.
Why not raise the price of the car by $1500 and then offer three "free" years of onstar?
Because then they would need to advertise a higher price.
Another reason to not buy a GM. They make terrible vehicles as well, super poor reliability.
It’s included in the sticker price.
So what’s the news here?
It helps if you read the article.
> The $1,500 plan is listed on the window sticker as a separate line item along with other additions to the vehicle’s standard equipment, but there is no option to remove it or order the vehicle without it. Customers who decline to activate their OnStar service will not be given a price reduction, GM said.
Yes, the article is pretty clear.
> It’s included in the manufacturer’s suggested retail price
That's basically like complaining "what, I bought a car but the price for tires was listed separately, and they didn't let me buy the car without the tires!!!"
Because if they put on the car window:
Car: €19999
Tires: €999
Just so they could have a main price tag under €20,000 while charging €21000, then they would also get complaints
lol so dumb but I get it. I'm not surprised at all. This is the future model of a lot of things to come.
Well you lost one customer
So it begins
Title is pretty misleading. This is only on certain models from those makes
There's no guarantee that it will not be added to other models in the future. Because we're talking about a large corporation raising prices, there's no reason that a 2026 Chevy Malibu wouldn't have this. Shareholders would approve.
My inner cynic says some slippery slopes are real.
I guess this depends on how well cars with mandatory subscriptions sell compared to before. If the number of sales goes up, or stays the same I would guess more manufacturers start doing this.
And I'd say this is the slippery slope from smart home devices all requiring a subscription. Since everything "smart" requires backend infrastructure and cloud bills can't be paid for the entire lifecycle up front, get ready to see a lot of subscriptions added to things that didn't have it before.
That's a fair point, but it still doesn't make the title read accurately
... which is still pretty shitty.
I'm just saying that the headline reads different than the article, I'm not making a judgement on the contents of the article
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?
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?
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
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.
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.