Mercedes is taking over the hellish ways pioneered right here within the videogames business by providing house owners of their Mercedes-EQ electrical car line the “alternative” to pay an enormous yearly charge in an effort to make their automotive go from 0 to 60MPH quicker. You may get this on both the EQS or EQE automobiles, the place it’s going to present one thing like a 0.8 to 1.0 second enhance within the acceleration from 0 to 60.
As reported by The Drive (opens in new tab), Mercedes is asking (opens in new tab) $1,200 a yr to “Speed up extra powerfully: enhance the torque and most output of your Mercedes-EQ.”
To be clear, that is unacceptable and absurd within the excessive. It is one thing I would anticipate out of a parody of company greed. That is charging for a software program replace that extra optimally tweaks the automotive’s torque by fine-tuning the electrical motor. It is not some costly, expansive cloud-computing service that wants second to second calculations delivered to the car. It is artificially limiting the ability of a machine somebody paid for until they pay a subscription.
Mercedes’ money seize comes after controversy earlier this yr when BMW wished individuals to pay to use (opens in new tab) the heated seats of their automobiles. A bodily function of their automotive. A chunk of easy bodily tools. Individuals responded to this by pirating their heated seats. (opens in new tab)
Each of those are madness-inducing, and I hope that these sociopathic “improvements” do not make their means again to PC gaming. Think about how excited Nvidia or AMD can be to promote you a service that makes your graphics card “go quicker”? How thrilled would Intel be to run a subscription that “unlocks two cores!!” in your CPU? Wait, this kind of already happens (opens in new tab)?
Frankly, I am upset simply occupied with it.
