Mercedes holds performance hostage behind paywall subscription model

Big bad Benz wants to hold the performance of your new car for ransom behind a paywall subscription model. You'd better pay up and await further instructions. And don't think about calling the FBI. This is a hostage negotiation…

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If you are that quintessential well-dressed and suitably self-obsessed, insufferable Mercedes-Benz buyer, then your ownership is about to get even more expensive.

In recent history, Mercedes-Benz has hardly been the harbinger of premium build quality and superior customer care, has it?

There was the:

• right-hand drive crabbing AWD systems in GLC,

• the squealing brakes in C63 AMG,

• the botched COMAND online system,

• the headlights filling with water,

• the failed X-Class ute,

• the $650M dealer lawsuit on the back of

• the Fixed Price Promise

• the $12.5 million Takata airbag penalty and

• the 10-year downward sales death spiral >>

Things just don’t seem to be getting through the skulls at Mercedes-Benz head office.

Nonetheless, senior executive nobodies at Mercedes-Benz USA said recently:

Coming soon: Accelerate more powerfully, increase the torque and maximum output of your Mercedes EQ.

Boost the performance of your Mercedes EQ. The feeling of driving your Mercedes EQ is a new experience every day, particularly its powerful, immediate acceleration.

Acceleration Increase boosts this performance even further, electronically increasing the motor's output, also increases the torque significantly, giving you a faster 0-60 miles per hour time.

Acceleration power you can see. Your advantages at a glance:

- Fine tuning of the electric motors increases the maximum power output (kilowatts) of your Mercedes EQ by 20 to 24 percent, depending on the original output from the factory.

- The torque is also increased, enabling your vehicle to accelerate noticeably faster and more powerfully this shortens the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour by around 0.8 to 0.96 seconds. This additional output is available in all Dynamic-Select drive programs.

- EQE goes from six seconds to 5.1 with this subscription upgrade…

Just let that sink in for a sec.

For the low, low price of just $1200 a year, you can go from stationary to the tonne in 6.2 seconds or 5.2 in the EQE+ by jumping from 215 to 260 kilowatts. Or in the the even harder, more engorged EQS, you’ll go from 0-100km/h in 5.3 to 4.5 seconds, or in the SUV version of EQS, do it in 5.8 to 4.9 by upping from 265 kilowatts to 330.

Over five years that's only a $6000 extorsion. It presents such outstanding value for EQE owners who are getting 45 kilowatts extra for just $1200 a year - that's 21 per cent more power - and incredibly, EQS owners are getting 65 extra kilowatts for their additional outlay; that's 25 per cent more power. I’m very surprised it’s not more expensive than that.

Whoever came up with the idea to hold Tiffany’s Mercedes to ransom should be the first to tell her.

So Mercedes-Benz says (without actually saying it) you're gonna put whatever payment method on the line and another US$1200 to ‘unlock’ the paywalled high performance version of your car. This is even thought all of the hardware is already built into that car and you paid for it when you bought it.

All they're doing is giving a little bit of extra code ‘down the line’, so to speak, that tells the car to just go a bit harder.

This is an egg car companies are going to find very hard to unscramble…

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WHY SUBSCRIPTIONS DON’T WORK WITH CARS

BMW emerged with a fair bit of yolk all over its face when it tried to charge people for heated seats in this way.

Check out the truth about BMW's subscription model for heated seats and other features >>

They did this despite the seat heating elements being already installed in the fricken car, and they wanted you to pay however much it was, 25 bucks a month or something, to unlock the seat heating function. Now, this probably doesn’t look or sound very attractive in Florida, but probably is fairly attractive in Alaska.

But here’s why subscriptions in cars fail.

Let's think about the broader context of subscription services. This whole micro-transaction phenomenon is everywhere and we all pay for some kind of subscription services. We've got Netflix and broadband and your mobile phone for calls, messaging and data, music subscriptions, gym memberships, or maybe you’re on of the handful of people who still subscribes to Wheels magazine.

In all of these cases insofar as I can see, you're paying to access an external network of information. You've got to remotely access the 4G and 5G mobile network using a device you pay for because you don’t have your own DIY smartphone built and working. You pay to keep the network of transmission towers maintained by a business that puts people up there to make it work.

Makes sense, right?

If you buy a Benz, you should get access to all of your Benz’s potential, surely - because that’s what you signed up for.

Subscription works if they give you added value, additional production potential, further access to whatever services that are external that you need to use. This is not that.

This is a hostage ransom.

You paid for that car, you own the hardware, the hardware is clearly designed to deliver that performance and yet they are holding it to ransom unless you pay them $6000 over five years of ownership.

Remember how many Mercedes vehicles with the COMAND online system were left in the lurch, despite paying a premium for that feature? This smells like that. How long before some coding glitch suddenly restricts your access to additional kilowatts?

No word yet on whether this Stockholm-Tronic Pro-Plus Max ransom subscription model will make it to Australia, but Mercedes-Benz is getting pretty desperate here. I’d surmise that customers in Australia and the USA would probably be sufficiently dumb enough in the majority to cop this sort of thing on the chin.

Mercedes fined $12.5M over misleading statements (official judgement) >>

Mercedes is clearly going to have to do something to pump up the revenue soon because these premium car manufacturers have a real problem and they haven't figured out how to solve it yet, clearly, as this imperfect experiment proves.

Let’s quickly go back to the 80s and 90s.

In the early 1980s, I was an amateur car enthusiast, yet to become a journalist, yet to graduate as an engineer and I was a car nut. I used to know a kid from the gym whose parents were really rich. His dad was a celebrity doctor who would drive a Mercedes 560 SEC at the time, which might as well have been the space shuttle.

There was a time when Mercedes-Benz really was ‘the best or nothing’ - but times have changed. Image: Sotherby’s.

When you think about the Commodores and Kingswoods and Falcons that the rest of us middle-class were in - mum and dad had them, and we had even older shittier versions of the same thing. When you compared our average cars to the 560 SEC, it had this amazing array of equipment that really was properly luxurious and seriously performance oriented.

Over the next four decades that gulf between luxury and mainstream has been eroded substantially, because technology is just off the shelf now.

You want adaptive cruise control? Carmakers just buy 500,000 systems from Cadogan Systems or Bosch and they're pre-calibrated; you just screw them in on the production line. They’re just as available to Hyundai, Kia, Toyota and Mitsubishi as they are to Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. It's the same technology.

Heated seats: same thing. Climate control air-conditioning: same thing - call up Denso or AC Delco or whomever and order however many million you need. All of this technology is just off-the-shelf now.

The gap between prestige cars and mainstream cars has really shrunk, and in some cases, on objective criteria, the mainstream car is more luxurious than the prestige car at the same price point. Go sit in a Mazda CX-9 Azami LE, a Hyundai Santa Fe Highlander or Kia Sorento GT-Line >>

This ransom subscription attempt by Mercedes-Benz is simply trying to squeeze more money out of you to access performance you should already receive having bought the car outright.

The United States does not negotiate with terrorists, so why should you pay the ransom to access your own car?

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