‘Eventually I won’t have a choice’: Car subscriptions for remote start and extra horsepower pile on top of a record $787 average payment
Source: Fortune ·
Automakers are charging monthly for remote start and extra horsepower already built into cars. Next to a record $787 average car payment, the fees are easy to overlook.
From the source
Asher Davis was vaguely aware that subscription-based car perks had “become a thing,” he said. But when the 33-year-old was thrown into the new-car market unexpectedly, after nine years of blissful ignorance, what he found disturbed him: as far as he could tell, the roster of new cars with no subscriptions attached had dwindled drastically. “I feel like eventually I won’t have a choice,” he told Fortune. Davis’s frustration is aimed less at any single subscription—offerings run the gamut from remote start to horsepower upgrades—than at the market’s direction. Automakers are betting that drivers will get used to paying monthly for features built into cars they’ve already bought. Early evidence suggests consumers will tolerate some of it, but not fees for hardware they’ve already paid for, and their willingness to pay is slipping. Why automakers are flipping the switch Edmunds doesn’t formally track the spread of subscription-based car features, according to Ivan Drury, the firm’s…
BestAIBroker analysis
- Finance-aware sentiment: slightly negative (-0.10 on a -1 to +1 scale).
- Event classification: OTHER.
- Market importance score: 33/100, weighting entity relevance, source credibility, multi-outlet coverage and recency.