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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.)

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> two oil changes, a tune-up, and a tire rotation

What is this, the 60s? Modern gas cars are so computer controlled that the concept of a "tune-up" effectively no longer exists, and they go 10,000 miles between oil changes so most people don't even average a single oil change every 6 months. EVs are even lower maintenance, but the difference isn't nearly as big as you're implying.

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I think that is still in agreement to my point. Even ICE maintenance is no longer the same schedule (and cost patterns) as it was when the dealership model was invented. EVs push it to a "crisis mode", but it has been a building misaligned incentives problem for decades.
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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.

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Aviation is an incredibly low-margin business - airlines are less trying to earn "massive profits" and more just trying to continue to operate year over year
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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.)

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$240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service
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its likely not the metadata, since they already have access and sell that, but then they can sell ads on maps like Google does.
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