GM’s Turn To Be Stupid

Yet again we are seeing a car company look to the world of recurring revenue to help boost sales. A GM subscription looks to be on the horizon. I hope like other attempts at a car subscription, it dies in a very large fire. Rob Stumpf at The Drive has more.

General Motors expects consumers to fork over as much as $135 per month on top of their car note in the coming years just to pay for subscription features. Previously, General Motors' Senior Vice President of innovation and growth, Alan Wexler, said that the company's research indicated that consumers were willing to pay up to $135 per month on services for their vehicles. By 2030, GM anticipates that 30 million of its vehicles on U.S. roads will be equipped with some form of connected tech, and that will help enable the automaker to generate additional revenue—between $20 billion and $25 billion—much of that from either one-time purchases or subscriptions.

The Drive

A GM subscription for a car you already own is bonkers. Tack on $135 a month lobbed on top of your existing payments and you're inducing people to not pay. I do think as time goes on, people will turn to manufacturers who don't do this or will "jailbreak" their cars. I will repeat the fact that we are soon turning into a culture of perpetual renters. As time goes on we own less and less. Phones are on upgrade plans, and tech and appliances we buy cannot be fixed easily. Devices are made to be disposable and last a lot less than they used to. This is one area where Right To Repair has a huge leg to stand on. Because fixing our stuff means we own it even longer. But now with cars, it has diagnostics you can't access except at a dealership, along with paywalled features, which are less and less ours.

The best thing people can do is simply let these companies know it's complete crap.