Similar vibes than Reddit api pricing
Fuck Elon. Fuck Tesla.
I was their target demographic and Elon made sure that I never even consider their trash. I went BMW instead.
I thought BMW wanted a subscription for heated seats. You know, the seats already in your car but software locked with a paywall.
I went Audi but to be completely honest Hyundai and Kia make the best EVs.
I needed a single payment lease and BMW does those with zero hassle.
I just got the Ford Mach-e last weekend and I’m super happy with it.
Yeah, I like the Mach-e a lot too. I think it maxes out at 150 kW of charging speed, which is the same as my Audi. But the Hyundai does 240 kW and that’s super speedy!
That BMW iDrive looks good but if it’s all app and touchscreen based… Imma skip.
TBH though, all the damn nice EVs are touch screens or bubble crossovers.
Why the fuck do I want to drive a bubble. I want to drive an electric car. Take the Ford Mustang, put the electric parts in it, and don’t turn it into a crossover. Take the Toyota 86, put electric parts in it. Do not turn it into a cross over.
Idk take any fucking car that looks like a fun car and goddamn it, put electric parts in it, don’t add touchscreens, and don’t stick your lips on the wand of soap and blow into the frame making it a goddamn bubble crossover.
Ioniq 6.
Because it’s not that easy. Batteries are big, people want 250+ miles on a charge and battery tech isn’t there for standard sedans and smaller.
I just went through this and ended up with the mach-e (which I’m very happy with) but it still weighs about as much as my minivan (almost 5000lbs).
All EVs are nearly 5000lbs. The xDrive i4 I mentioned is 5063lbs
But the interior DOES have buttons so it’s back on my like list.
There was something about the i4 I just didn’t like. I think it was how it felt kind of like an m3 to me. In the sense that if all you care about is going fast, then it’s a great car, but it’s not the luxury of the 5 or 7 series, which is what I think of when I think of BMW.
I’m too old for a car like that, and don’t drive enough to justify the i5 price, so I went economical (in comparison at least) with the mach-e. It’s fun to drive, has enough gitty-up-and-go for me, and it’s comfortable.
Though I got reeeeeeally close to saying fuck it and getting the i5.
I’m waiting for the price on used i5s to drop a bit before I trade my car in for one. Since they’re only a year old, they’re still super pricy. i4 is a bit small for me if I have people in the back.
The 530e is pretty perfect for me in the meantime. Only 20 mile range on full electric, but that works pretty perfectly for me since I can charge at home and at work. On longer trips I can still burn dinosaurs, but I only fill the tank up a few times per year. I think I’ve put gas in it 6 times this year, and that includes a couple ~3 hour trips.
I’ve thought about Tesla, but there’s so much I don’t like about them.
I’ve got a RAV4 that will last quite a while if I need space. In 6-12 months, hopefully after I buy I home, I’m going to need a car that says “single software engineer dad with midlife crisis money” and my boy loves the interior of the i4 coupe.
I’ll look at the i5 though
This is why Elonia is asking trump to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Other car manufacturers started biting into Tesla market share this year.
Poor Queen Elonia.
He want to add tarrifs and he is also asking Trump to remove government subsidies on new EV purchases, raising the barrier to entry in the US for EVs
There’s no way he’s asking for that. If you can find a source for that claim I’d love to see it. But it’s about the dumbest thing musk could do.
Wow… Well I maintain that is about the dumbest thing he could do, but I apologize for doubting you.
It’s a good way to make money by shorting his competitors’ stocks.
How is it driving without turn signals? Granted, given they put them as buttons on the friggin steering wheel in the new Teslas, maybe not much different?
I am sad to say that the old joke is becoming obsolete. These new cars are smart. If you try to change lanes without a turn signal, the car beeps loudly to tell you that you have drifted. Our company also has a Sprinter van that will actually pull you back into your lane. Sad times.
Turn signals aren’t for you, they’re for other drivers. I can’t hear the other car yelling at their driver, I just see them decide to cut into my lane with no warning or signal.
Same
BMW lobbies against non-car based infrastructure and car industry regulation here in Germany. Biggest shareholder is the Quandt family, who are descendant from literal Nazis, and now use part of their billions to fund the conservatives (at least they aren’t giving it to the far-right. Yet.)
So yeah, fuck Elon, but fuck BMW too.
Yeah fine me a car company that’s not like that. Living in the US it’s a necessity to have a car so just gonna nix that argument. I bought a Toyota to get ultimate reliability (yes Honda is basically equal) but I’m sure they both have done equally terrible shit. And when I’m not in grad school I want to go back to a BMW because they are great cars to drive. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism so just try to enjoy your life where you can.
On the one hand, sure. On the other hand, if you’re saying you bought from brand A, not B, specifically because the big boss of B is a shithead, I feel like it’s valid to point out the ways the big boss of A is shit too.
Since everyone is shit, I dunno, buy used, I guess.
“Theres no ethical consumption under capitalism, so what do you expect me to drive a used car like a PEASANT? If i cant consume 100% ethically ill just consume however i want, and i want a fancy german treat car so just shut up okay”
It’s good information and something I will take into account for next time.
Did u have to unlearn how to use an indicator?
Isnt that a mandatory class before they let u buy one?
You know I haven’t been to a dealership yet to find out.
BMW does have shady monetization tactics with their newer car, but Subaru shred almost every other car brands to dust
Are Subaru cars still loud AF? I had a 2002 Impreza, and a 2012 and both had lots of road noise with everything in the car popping or cracking with every bump.
Okay that’s not just me, thank god. I thought something was just wrong with the sound deadening on my Forester, especially because my 30 year old Mazda 323 is at least 50% quieter. Nope, its what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.
Of course, and that’s part of the charm. They bag out like a pair of leather slippers. I read something recently about them using a shit ton more adhesive in the new Forester so maybe it’s improving? My 2015 isn’t that bad, but I hate driving in general so basic appliance standards is fine by me.
never owned a BMW, or a Tesla for that matter, but I’ve heard they’re just as bad when it comes to being money hungry
That is correct, but at least BMW knows how to make decent cars that won’t trap you in in an emergency.
A friend bought a new BMW. Everything is controlled with an app. There’s also an interface in the car itself, obviously, but the app has more functions.
Things like seat heating, air conditioner, enhanced cruise control and all the fancy things are only available if you subscribe to one of the three offerings.
I just glanced over the app, so i don’t remember the names, but it went like the usual: basic, premium, platinum.
Prices were in the range of 200, 400, 700 euros a fucking month.
Yeah choosing BMW is a strange choice against something like Tesla when they are doing the same sort of thing. I won’t criticize the “I’m rich so I bought an expensive car” thing, that can happen elsewhere, but the idea that BMW is the lesser of the evils isn’t really accurate.
I wish we were in a world where we could more easily avenge our terrible upbringing in this system moment after moment like Geralt, where if we’re to choose between the lesser of two evils, we’d rather not choose at all.
Are you saying that you can’t use the A/C without subscribing to their app?
I think they are very mistaken about the options requiring a subscription and their price. Most of the options you could get a subscription for also are available as a one time purchase… the same way they were in the past. Heating and air conditioning aren’t among those options, they come standard in every car.
BMW did drop the subscription for heated seats after backlash. That one was stupid. The other options I’m a little torn on. There are costs associated with developing the software used for most of the options like driving assistance. I have no problem paying for that development, and the subscription lets me try it for a month to see if it’s worth it. As long as there is the ability to outright buy the option instead of locking into a perpetual subscription I’m chill with it. I also hope that once unlocked, the option is still available when resold. This part I’m not so sure about, but mine seemed to maintain the options purchased by the original owner.
It’s not a super recent article, but a list of options and pricing is available at the bottom of this page: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/bmw-quietly-launches-in-car-subscriptions-in-u-s/
I only had the chance to peek and after reading your comment, it sounds very plausible that general heating is a basic function. I’m sure i saw the seat-heating, in the lowest price subscription though. It must have been before they dropped the subscription for it. The paid air conditioning included air purifing with hepa and carbon filters and some iirc Plasmacluster Ion technology.
I should have been a little more specific …
Even by not subscribing to the paid subscriptions he said he had to subscribe to the basic subscription, which enables the app.
It looked like they will also drop a random paid feature into the basic for a limited time, every few weeks another feature, so people get to test it. That’s what the ad in the app suggested.
I didn’t think about the one time purchase to be honest. I assume it to be featured in a submenu, to make it less prominent than the subscription, in order to get a bigger number of subscribers.
There is no such thing as a benevolent corporation. Don’t feed the fascists. Don’t give your money to Elon.
EDIT: Autocorrect derp
I mean, fuck Elon and Tesla but if you’re spending money on a car you’re giving it to a bastard one way or another. The CEOs of Ford, BMW, et. al. might not be making asses of themselves on the global stage, but I’m sure they’re still horrible. Even used cars run on gas 99% of the time.
There are levels of bad. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (or in this case, only slightly better).
There goes TeslaFi… fuck. I use that all the time to see my global map and keep track of my stats (like power usage on long drives), and auto enabling of certain features at certain times, like heat/ac after work.
These changes only affect the Fleet API. TeslaFi is fine for now.
Ah! I see! TeslaFi uses the owner API. Wheeew. Hopefully this will be fine for most apps.
Just got an email that TeslaFi uses the Fleet API, so this definitely affects them.
rent seeking strikes back
Another reminder to developers to not bother with public APIs, just screen-scrape or reverse-engineer the official app private API.
Really the lesson is, don’t run a business that 100% depends on another company.
This. It’s a recipe for disaster. I think enough (tech-related) companies have shown now, that they first want to lock you in, and then if they got you, want to bleed you out…
Virgin API user vs chad scrapper.
Then you’re at risk of getting sued for cracking the encryption or the API breaking constantly
The real reminder is don’t integrate with devices which you can’t trust
Yeah guys. Downvote me. This is literally part of my day job.
In our industry we call not using an official API a dumpster fire API. Because more than once it has completely broken eventually, and there are a few manufacturers warned will break in the upcoming future
Is it illegal to scrape? I mean most companies and governments scrape huge amounts of data all the time without getting anyones permission, hell the entire business of a search engine is basically WeScrape4U.
If you extract a key from a proprietary client to decrypt a private API, it definitely is illegal. If you do this as a corporation, it would also be easy to detect by abnormal usage patterns tied to your account and presents you as a nice big set of pockets to get sued.
Just screen scraping isn’t illegal, but is fragile as fuck and will break at the worst time and you have no ability to implement version control to manage it.
Personally I wouldn’t want to be the guy forced to write scrapers with how much they break on any modern site
Its Tesla; y’all should be dumping that shit anyway.
Tesla can eat penis.
A bag of.
A whole bag?
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Penises should be loved.
One more reason I’m glad I bought a car with CarPlay / Android Auto support.
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CarPlay allows third party maps for sure.
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I’m confused. Non google maps can run on Android auto and can even run on the Home Screen view. Same for CarPlay and alternatives to Apple Maps.
I’m not sure what exactly the previous commenter said but map apps in particular only show up if installed through the Play Store. I found that out after trying to get Organic Maps working through F-Droid and Aurora Store. If you’re rooted you can change the app’s ‘installed from’ field to the Play Store and it will show up.
My guess is that Google, like Apple, it’s pretty nervous about letting developers go crazy with UIs that are used while driving.
I know that, for CarPlay, the approval process is more ridged than with a mobile or desktop app.
My guess is that Google and Apple don’t want to be found liable for dangerous / distracting technology.
Its only “Navigation” apps though, media and messaging apps work just fine in Android Auto from another source or sideloaded.
Interesting. TIL.
Damn that’s crazy I didn’t realize my third party map app was actually just Google maps
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When Twitter (and Reddit) pulled this off, I was just mildly pissed. Can’t do interesting things with my data, oh no.
…Image that, except it’s an expensive luxury car you’re no longer allowed to do interesting things with.
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Hehehe, we all know how that’s like. I’m sure this income will truly be used to improve their services and support robust and reliable API infrastructure.
Greed twists all minds.
Duh.
I hate subscription services. And I hate money-grubbing corps. Especially when they try to profit off of your own data.
That said, this is not that as infeasible as it sounds. The dev for Tessie reportedly has 400k users. That’s roughly $12.50/month per user. Modestly speaking, if the dev charged their users $13/mo, he’d profit $2.4 million per year. For $15/mo, he would profit $12 million per year.
That’s probably what Tesla is hoping their devs would do. And I’m sure a lot of Tesla owners could afford the fee.
well that’s some solid bootlicking lol
how much does it cost tesla to provide API access? or we don’t discuss their costs structure and profit margin? we only do that for the guy doing the actual work lol
Not sure which side of the argument you’re taking. But, to answer your questions…
how much does it cost tesla to provide API access?
Not as much as they would want you to believe. Most APIs are written once, and only updated if a major change in the backend happens. The majority of any operating costs would go into cloud services, if the telemetry from the car is sent to Tesla first. I don’t own a Tesla, so I don’t know for sure. I would imagine it’s, because that would allow Tesla better metrics on app usage.
or we don’t discuss their costs structure and profit margin?
Whose? Tesla or the app developers? I’m not against a business making a profit. It’s kind of the point. They provide some sort of service, and as a customer we pay some sort of fee. The problem as I see it, some companies (like Twitter, Reddit, and Tesla for example) are not balancing the age-old “supply and demand” model of economics. Of course that’s my opinion.
we only do that for the guy doing the actual work
Huh? Please explain.
lol
I don’t get it. Why do people end their otherwise non-funny statements with “lol”?
Tesla tubby is price gouging.
You came. Explaining how this price is fine since the app dev can make some money based on some basic math while not doing the same for telsa tubby.
Why this bias? How much money is telsa making per head, what is their cost structure? Should you have discussed this if we gonna justify this price gouging trick?
“Lol” here is sarcasm btw
Ps. Since they are data mining you already, could at least fucking provide api access for free which was the model pre covid mostly.
Now these parasites are data mining you and want you to pay for it 🤡
At least people are taking notice but I doubt this corpo trash will revert unless end user starts punish their profits.
Selling literal shit at a restaurant also isn’t unfeasible if the customer doesn’t care about eating shit. But nobody is going to eat shit and nobody (normal) is going to pay $10+ a month to get mostly gimmick features. At a glance there’s barely anything useful in the API.
You’ve accounted only for the API pricing. They already charge 7-20 USD per month. So their prices are going to jump to 19.50-32.50 USD a month.
That’s not feasible.
And then there’s 20 apps at $15/month each which collectively costs like $2 to run
Per user costs for a website is on the number of pennies a month and most of that is for electricity.
I can plug in a $750 second-hand server with a xeon processor, 40 TB of storage and 128gb of ram and easily serve all of the needs of several thousand users on essentially any website type for $1.50 a day.
Sure, if you throw in video and a lot of bandwidth then the number would go up, but for pictures and text and website interaction on the par of bluesky or twitter or mbin sans hosted video it would work very well.
If I reached the point where I needed to expand for the raw processing I can just throw another $1,000 and $45/month in electricity at it and double how much I can handle.
Computers are stupid cheap. Internet services are stupid cheap. Asking for more than a dollar a person per month for anything that doesn’t have licensing fees on it (like tv/movies) or very high bandwidth usage (like YouTube) is a greedy rip off.
That being said, at those prices I would not make anything for running the service, and that also would not cover additional development costs for any new features that needed to be added, but even so, unless your goal is to disenfranchise users you should not charge more than a buck a month or hell, $10 a year per person for all of their access to your service.
You’re ignoring transaction costs.
Also $15/month is batshit insane.
Yes, I didn’t account for the transaction fees. But I believe my point still stands. If people find enough value in it, they’d probably pay for it; and that’s why Tesla is charging what they are.
I do agree with you about it being batshit crazy. If it were me, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to pay $15/mo for that. But I try to be a cheapskate where I can.
I would imagine most of those 400k users wouldn’t pay that much either.
We can probably look at the reddit paid API change as a real world approximation of free to paid conversions versus users just dropping usage. Not reddit usage overall, but a third party app that stayed and needed to start charging users because of the paid API. Not sure if there are any apps that stuck around and released that sort of information to reference.
Did any stick around? I thought they all folded.
RedReader is still going, and is still free. I’ve been using it since essentially its first release over a decade ago. I was the first to suggest the dev accept donations, around 4 years ago, as it’s a one-man job and it used to get regular updates. And the dev has stated he wants to add lemmy functionality alongside the existing reddit code, so users can switch between the two like an account switch, and maintain the UI they are fond of.
(I’m using Thunder currently while I want for RR lemmy support, but obviously I quite like the app, have recommended it to many)
Relay for Reddit (Android) is still going it seems.
value in it, they’d probably pay for it; and that’s why Tesla is charging what they are.
Tesla is charging what they’re charging to eliminate competition, but still say they’re an open platform for anyone.
Imagine trying to sell cars and then pulling some shit like this
Similar vibes than Reddit api pricing
Reddit got the idea from Elon’s twitter API fees. This is Elon being consistent(ly terrible).
