You can chip most turbo engines for higher boost which means higher HP and torque. Current 911 vs the 911S is 13PSI vs 16PSI on the exact same engine. If you want Sports Plus mode which adds a little more boost, more aggressive shifting, tighter suspension, and launch control its also just software changes that porsche bundles with a dash clock.

Companies have been doing this for awhile. Whats new is the subscription charge. Tesla has performance mode for $2k that you can buy and install over the air.

People will figure out how to hack these things. But the difference here, I think, is that EVs tend to be much more software-driven than even the most sophisticated ICE car. They're likely to contain half-decent crypto that makes hacking much more difficult, and EV companies are likely to sue you under the DMCA if you succeed. In addition these cars are always connected to the mother ship which can disable the engine by remote control if they suspect tampering.

"Chipping" an EV is going to be much harder than it was with ICE cars.

EVs only incidentally happen to seem harder to hack. ICE powertrains have more complex electronics and software.

This is also about ICEs having a legacy of repairability which makes modifications easier. Corporations being what they are, EVs are specifically made to be impossible to repair in independent shops.

I'm confused as to how those two statements are different?

They already posses the capability to perform to the implied specifications with or without that $60/mo.

I understand the technical part: they are unlocking the extra power electronically.

What I don't understand is what is different between the headline saying that you can pay $60 for your car to go faster (true) and parent poster saying "pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do"?

Those two statements seem to say the same thing? What am I missing?

Good point.

Perhaps you are more comfortable with this approach than others, and are part of the tartget market Mercedes may be fishing for, which is just fine.

You straightforwardly don't seem deceived at all here either way.

OTOH I would estimate the majority of the target market is expected to be much more responsive to their marketing stance than my also-realistic interpretation.

BTW, congratulations on your coronation today, glad you took the time to comment with all the festivities surrounding the event.

It is too vague and suggestive towards some sort of active enhancements being performed during your subscription, whilst in reality all they do is flip some "is_castrated" boolean value in a database.

Paying doesn't make the machine perform better than it already could; Not paying makes the on-board software limit the machine to perform worse than what it's actually capable of.

The perspective. It makes customers think that the software update is tuning the engine or doing something special to get non-standard performance, which is a lie. Mercedes (and I know many other companies) will intentionally nerf their cars and LIMIT their performance, and in this case Mercedes is flat out saying they will limit their customers' performance unless they pay $$.

So it's really about who is saying what. Mercedes is trying to make customers think in their head that this is a value-added bonus that's not there by default, but it IS there by default, and it's locked behind a paywall. Rewriting the statement in OP's voice helps the customer recognize the scam that is taking place. In my opinion, at least.

Wait until you find out about binning or software limited engines

Binning is completely different, an i5 may be able to perform as fast an i7 if you overclock it, but it depends on your luck on how your i5 was, and it will almost certainly be unstable. Binning is the equivalent of making really fancy chocolates, and selling the slightly worse-looking chocolates for worse.

> and it will almost certainly be unstable

TBF - this depends how well they streamlined their manufacturing process. As yield goes up; getting a perfectly stable 3ghz chip binned as a 2ghz before a flash lock becomes increasingly common. It became common to hunt for specific chips for this reason back when I actually had time to pay attention to it.

That is true, I'm sure there have chips that have been purposely down-binned because they needed more i5s instead of i7s (probably not right now, but back when Intel was dominating and slacking).

But even that unique case is very different from literally blocking features in a chip for extra money per month (you couldn't pay Intel to up-bin an i5 to an i7, except for the 1 or 2 times they actually tried that)

Binning of electronic components goes back about a century to their initial commoditization.

So it's really matured in the same direction only further.

The most effective & consistent mass-production processes do not always produce components as identical as would be ideal, and not all equal in ultimate performance capability, especially in the most demanding applications.

This can be expected to be more problematic when production is first initiated, whether there are bugs to be worked out, or optimizations have yet to be accomplished.

With resistors the percent deviation from the target ohm value is a simple tolerance rating.

Not everyone needs resistors within 1 percent of their labeled value, but those that do can not settle for anything less.

When initial production results in a maximum deviation of 20%, during QC/QA each component (or batch) can be measured and binned into the 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% tolerance ratings.

And most importantly priced accordingly.

Interestingly, if the binning is most comprehensive, then the consumer of the 20% parts never gets a component closer than 10% of the nominal value.

Vacuum tubes are not quite so simple as resistors, but it was well-established that the military would gladly overpay for the very top-performing tubes meeting the tightest tolerances.

In earlier decades military tubes were often physically enhanced and produced separately from the lesser consumer versions.

By the 1950's things were very mature in this respect.

And it can be a lot less costly to manufacture everything the same.

So binning it was, to select the closest conformers, which were then labeled with military part numbers destined for a supply chain where price is not as significant as it is for consumers.

The remaining tubes then were marked with everyday consumer part numbers.

This really became prominent for dual-use items like radio tubes.

Once the manufacturing process was fully optimized and every tube met the most stringent specifications, the cost to make each tube can decline dramatically.

At the same time, freshly made tubes were no longer individually labeled, they then all went into one bin.

So the most overspending customers could be supplied the same parts at higher prices than everyone else from that point without anyone knowing the difference.

Unless the customer really checked the performance independently in great detail.

Depending on the customer ordering the parts, they would be labeled accordingly right before shipping, sometimes with a little more QA and/or written guarantee but not any additional costly manufacturing QC which might have been necessary at the begining of production. They could then better meet fluctuating demand between premium payers versus consumer usage from the same manufacturing line and a single ultimate bin. And with a different part number to inhibit direct substitution even after identical performance could be recognized in some cases.

So this was well underway before solid-state semiconductors became a commodity.

As the processes improve it ended up with price-sensitive consumers who figured out when the lesser-priced CPU's had become as high-performance as the premium-labeled "alternative".

With the complexity of modern CPU's it was basically trivial to circumvent this consumer effort with the last-minute fusing & labeling approach seen today.

We've come such a long way it's not like the 1950's at all.

Lots fewer consumers expect to get their money's worth, and some vendors are only looking for these type customers any more.

Eventually all they make is i7's and if you don't want to pay the price, they further customize the component to be especially crummy, just for you.

Not quite the same, but those are also being worked around by everyone and their mother. In many cases with dirty and damaging hack solutions, which only have to be that way due to the fact that no relevant technical documentation is published by the manufacturer.

And then there are plenty of people who will happily download and load a custom bios onto their $2k GPU that they found on some or other foreign-language forum without even the slightest clue as to how it works or what the possible consequences might be.

This will now also start being a thing with non-technical people and their cars.