I guess I'm way more comfortable with a one-time purchase unlock (kind of SW "license" upgrade) rather than a subscription for hardware that I have 100% of the time.
Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.
FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.
If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.
If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.
Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.
What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.
> And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active.
I think the only time they remove FSD from resales is when they repurchase the cars to resell themselves and then strip the used ones of FSD/upgrades. With private-to-private, private-to-dealership or dealership-to-private ownership transfers, FSD stays with the car.
In most countries they also have "FSD transfer", which means that if you trade-in your current Tesla when purchasing a new one, your FSD "license" is transferred to the new car.
Example: Acceleration Boost is a 2k one-time upgrade. Once you purchase it, you get it forever. EAP and FSD are the same: pay once, get for life. Those who purchased FSD before HW3 also got/get included driving computer upgrade. Of course this was done from Tesla to avoid backslash, but at the same time it was done without back-and-forth: they understood the situation and simply rolled it out.
FSD subscription makes sense because you purchase more "features", maybe for a limited time, for a much lower price.
If your daily driving is 20mi, you probably are fine with AP, and won't justify spending 4k on EAP, 8k on FSD or 100$/mo on the FSD subscription. But maybe if you trip for holidays for a few weeks, you can purchase the subscription for a couple months.
If you're daily driving 50+mi, or drive in very busy cities, I can see the 8k purchase offering some value if you want to keep the car more than 6 years (8k/100$ - 80 months, ~6.5y), and you can still try it out via subscription beforehand and decide to not pay the full price upfront.
Basically Tesla's model is mostly one-time license fee, except for FSD subscription to ease the access to software-powered features.
What VW is doing is selling you hardware, and then asking you to pay every month if you want to unlock its full potential. Honestly this should be illegal, a one-time fee should be the only way allowed. And I recognize they have the option of a one-time fee, but of course they're banking on people opting for the low-cost option and forget they have it active. EDIT: this is also the test bed for more subscription stuff, they want to see how people react to it. If there's no big backslash, expect more subscriptions to come.