Tag Archive for: Buyer’s

Subscription Fees Get Mixed Results from Car Buyers


A year after BMW began selling subscriptions to use its vehicles’ heated seats in South Korea, and with General Motors predicting annual software and services revenue of $25 billion by the end of the decade, S&P Global Mobility has surveyed nearly 8,000 consumers on the topic of vehicle feature subscription services.

S&P Mobility reported the results of its survey yesterday, saying that car-shoppers are largely satisfied with subscription-based infotainment services, but data security and privacy are concerns.

According to S&P Mobility, fewer than 30% of survey respondents are willing to pay for heated seats or a heated steering wheel by monthly subscription, and navigation and safety/security features were the ones most desired in respondents’ next vehicles.

As for infotainment subscriptions, the survey found that consumers favor their smartphone over their vehicle where features are redundant. Gen Z and Millennial respondents are most likely to drop connected-services subscriptions because of similar services on their smartphones, says S&P Mobility.

This could explain GM’s decision last year to remove Apple CarPlay and Android Auto user interfaces from its forthcoming electric vehicle lineup, opting for the company’s own infotainment system instead. According to S&P Mobility, GM sees an opportunity in consumer usage data.

“GM cannot get consumers’ usage data from the infotainment system if users only connect via third party apps like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto,” says Fanni Li, connected car services research lead at S&P Global Mobility. “Having this data on their own will become one of the competitive advantages for OEMs.”

When it comes to data collection, 37% of respondents worry about security issues, while 32% fail to understand the value that a connected service would provide from the shared data, says S&P Mobility. At the same time, the survey reported 31% of consumers “feeling comfortable” with OEM’s collecting their data.

These concerns did not seem to alter respondent subscribers’ attitudes towards subscription services, however. S&P Mobility reports in a subset of about 4,500 respondents who had experienced a free trial or an existing…

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Tesla Fire Sale in China Fails: Buyers Ignore The Texas Discount Brand


Recently the Tesla CEO has tried to argue the market with the most buyers in the world is completely hostile to his brand.

You’d think he was talking about China.

He has been repeatedly throwing bigger and bigger discounts there to try and find someone interested in buying his old and sagging cars.

Tesla cut prices in China for the second time in three months, as demand for its cars falters. Elon Musk’s EV maker discounted its cars by up to 13.5%…

Huge price cuts and huge payouts aren’t enough, apparently; Chinese don’t like the Texas discount car brand and for good reasons.

But actually the CEO was talking about California.

…attorneys representing Tesla and Musk argue that the CEO has garnered extensive and negative publicity in California…

His augment is basically that when he does dumb things that make him unpopular (e.g. fraud, repeatedly caught lying and cheating) he should be judged only by people who he thinks like him (who he gives money).

This looks and sounds like a criminal’s getaway plan.

Beg for billions from the government of California, then beg Texas and China to take in the ill-gotten money in exchange for protection from California.

Tesla has received more than $3.2 billion worth of direct and indirect California subsidies and market mechanisms since 2009…

It reminds me of when Uber got into trouble with San Francisco authorities (due to fraud including misleading statements about safety, similar to Tesla).

They then very publicly announced their exit to “more friendly” Arizona, where they subsequently (very predictably) killed a pedestrian and were completely shut down. It never recovered, even in San Francisco.

The Tesla CEO this would be lucky to be tried for his alleged crimes in California, given its more modern justice system and long-term government investments.

Texas and China, like Arizona almost instantly flipping on Uber, have nothing to lose from sending the recently arrived outsider straight to the gallows.

China’s Bernie Madoff Was Executed for Fraud—and Nobody Told His Family

Really.

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Data Breach Leaks 198M Car Buyers’ Personal Data – pymnts.com

Data Breach Leaks 198M Car Buyers’ Personal Data  pymnts.com

A massive data breach has compromised the records of 198 million car buyers. Jeremiah Fowler, a senior security researcher at Security Discovery, discovered …

“data breach” – read more