You own your car, except for the parts you don’t own. But don’t worry, you can rent those from the car company. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
It used to be that when you bought a car, it was yours.
It’s now theirs – even if you paid for it.
All made possible by the transitioning of cars into battery-powered devices, just like a cell phones. And just the same way.
For instance, the Lyriq, a device sold by Cadillac. You can pay – again – to “unlock” 74 ft.-lbs. more torque from the electric drivetrain you thought you already bought. That torque wasn’t actually added, of course. It was there when you thought-you-bought the device. But Cadillac wants another $1,200 to let you have what you thought-you’d-already bought.
This is the subscription based model of what will no longer be car ownership, going forward.
It was pioneered by Bill Gates and emulated by Elon Musk’s Tesla grift, which was the first device manufacturer to assert ownership over what it had already sold, just as Gates asserted ownership in-perpetuity over the code people thought they’d bought (never mind the dubiety of his own ownership claims).
People who thought-they’d-bought Teslas discovered this when they sold what they thought were their cars, having paid for them – via angry new not-really-owners, who discovered after they’d bought what-they-thought-they-were-buying that some of the features they’d-thought-they’d-bought weren’t working. But it wasn’t because they weren’t working. It was because Tesla had turned off these features – such as the vaunted self-driving feature. If the new owner wanted what he’d assumed the car had – because that’s what the device came with (and that’s how it was advertised) he’d have to pay Tesla to “unlock” the feature.
