- Joined
- Jan 25, 2015
- Messages
- 2,558
That's common practice these days. Not the "subscription", but writing one OS and turning things on and off.They claim it’s for people who didn’t order heated seats to be able to get that feature at a future date. If you order the car that way, you don’t pay the subscription, at least in the US. The article I read said building all the cars with the most common features and then turning them on if customers wants them is actually a good idea, I object to paying monthly for that since you know at some point there will not be the option to buy outright since there is more money from subscriptions. A lot of software applications are going that way. I’m a photographer and the most popular editing software is subscription based, so if I stop my subscription, I can’t use the software any longer and make any additional edits to my photos that I made previously. I would have to start over with whatever software I switched to.
Take my 2016 F150 lariat for example. I ordered it with the 502A option level, which has nearly, but not all, the "expensive" options. Once home, I added adaptive cruise control, hill decent control, parallel parking and lane keeping.
I had to add a little bit of hardware (a few sensors and subordinate wiring harness here and there) and the rest was getting into the "asbuilt" files in the modules to change a few bytes here and there. I've got the software/hardware already, so the rest was just figuring out what turned what on and off.
Other things are just software changes. I added "Lincoln fold" for the power mirrors (they fold in every time you leave the truck and lock the door) and "police mode (if the key leaves the vehicle with it running, the truck locks the shifter in park and locks the wheel). No hardware to install, just software changes.
Modern vehicles are a bit of a crap shoot if you like to work on them yourself. They make some things easier and at the same time, they make other things harder on the home mechanic guy....
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