One morning on a country road, your car suddenly runs short of power: 27 horsepower have just been locked away by a software update, one month after delivery. The engine has lost nothing. Volkswagen, Tesla, Ford and BMW now sell cars full of switched-off features: what you pay for is no longer the equipment, but the right to switch it on.

Volkswagen takes 27 horsepower off an ID.3 after the first month, and Tesla no longer sells its self-driving system in Europe, it rents it out at 99 euros a month. A feature billed at 20 euros a month brings in close to 3,000 euros over the life of an American car. The real gold mine is the used market: 80% of connected cars brought in nothing, and New York State now wants to sort these subscriptions out.

Chapters
00:00 One January morning
01:19 Hardware on board, switched off
03:14 What a rented feature is worth
05:06 The second owner and the lawmaker
07:18 What is the lesson?

Sources: connected service pricing in North America, January 2026, communications from Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and General Motors, a 2021 survey of American car owners, the New York State bill, IntoTheMinds analyses.

The full analysis, with all the charts: https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/

This episode was written by Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, founder of the market research firm IntoTheMinds.

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