I think one of the things at issue here is that "professional service every six months" with EVs has gone from two oil changes, a tune-up, and a tire rotation to "maybe just a tire rotation". Most people don't do tire rotations that regularly, and any garage can do a tire rotation who needs to go to the dealership for that. They might be hoping that they can use some of that $240/yr to make dealers a little bit happier about selling EVs.

Which does sort of get slightly to the heart of some recent things that the dealer model in the US has always been sometimes antagonistic to consumers, EVs make that worse, and it may be time for brand new dealer regulation. (Though that alone won't address the subscription fees because car companies will want recurring revenue with or without dealers.)

This is part of a broader trend I see in all consumer markets: especially in markets with just a few large important players: the companies start making very unpopular moves in the hopes that their competitors will realize the massive profit potential and follow them out of greed rather than try to steal customers by being the good guys.

Examples: self-ordering kiosks at restaurants, every change made at every airline in the last 15 years, bandwidth caps at ISPs, “resort fees” at every hotel, tipping for car services, etc.

They know that since there aren’t many options, it doesn’t matter if customers all hate it, as long as they have no choice. The automakers (at least in their fantasies) smell blood in the water for the idea of CarPlay/Android Auto, and want to kill it if they can.

I turned down buying a Rivian for exactly this reason, but it seems plenty of consumers don’t care.

Curious if anyone has been able to calculate the sales and profits surrendered by the likes of GM and Rivian due to this switch. (My guess is it’s low.)

$240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service