Citizen-T
Active Member
As a software engineer, I can tell you we often charge a lot more than $600/year for access to our support lines, bug fixes, and new features. I wouldn't be surprised if a big chunk of that $600 is paying for the fact that you are going to be receiving bug fixes and new features regularly.
This is something new that you can't easily compare to other ICE maintenance. Other car software doesn't really change much from year-to-year, not because it doesn't need to, but because traditional car companies are not software companies and don't realize how important that is to the modern consumer. Ask my wife about her MyFord Touch; we've received one major update which just barely brought the system into a state that I would consider "usable".
I would happily pay $150 a year (maybe even more) if I saw updates like new skins, a 3rd party app store, creep on/off, speed warning chimes, performance improvements, voice controls, additional graphs and gauges, new media sources and integration (Pandora or Spottily maybe?), etc., etc. coming down the pike at a reasonable rate. Now, for that price I expect some pretty rapid and awesome incremental improvement with high quality, but yeah, I think that's reasonable.
I also think that we need to keep the scale in mind. It takes the same number of software engineers to develop this stuff for one model car with 20,000 owners, as it does for an entire model lineup with millions of owners. Maybe we can see the price come in a bit as the cost of all this stuff is spread across more owners.
This is something new that you can't easily compare to other ICE maintenance. Other car software doesn't really change much from year-to-year, not because it doesn't need to, but because traditional car companies are not software companies and don't realize how important that is to the modern consumer. Ask my wife about her MyFord Touch; we've received one major update which just barely brought the system into a state that I would consider "usable".
I would happily pay $150 a year (maybe even more) if I saw updates like new skins, a 3rd party app store, creep on/off, speed warning chimes, performance improvements, voice controls, additional graphs and gauges, new media sources and integration (Pandora or Spottily maybe?), etc., etc. coming down the pike at a reasonable rate. Now, for that price I expect some pretty rapid and awesome incremental improvement with high quality, but yeah, I think that's reasonable.
I also think that we need to keep the scale in mind. It takes the same number of software engineers to develop this stuff for one model car with 20,000 owners, as it does for an entire model lineup with millions of owners. Maybe we can see the price come in a bit as the cost of all this stuff is spread across more owners.