Hoo boy. GM wants more of your money and they'll just take it.
If you don't want to pay for in-car subscriptions every month, no problem: Just pay it all upfront. That's the line from General Motors today after news spread that it's making a three-year, $1,500 OnStar connected services subscription a mandatory "option" for new Buick, GMC, and Cadillac Escalade models....
So what do you get for this minor extortion?
...The subscription, which enables things like using your phone as a key fob, data-enabled navigation, audio streaming, and Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant...
Oh, goodie goodie!! GM forces you to pay them for what's already available on your phone!
And it's coming to Chevy, too.
As a business model, mandatory ONSTAR fees are just plain stupid. This is a case study on how to drive customers to your competitors.
ReplyDeleteYah, well......the OLD biz model of selling a car to a customer every 2-3 years is dead; they've substituted leasing, but that's not a house afire in demand. So they have to make it on a 6-10 year sales cycle plus spare parts.
ReplyDeleteOnStar is--effectively--SAAS, not different from the annual fees for software packages. It's a nice, fat, nearly cost-free revenue dollar with virtually zero attached liability concerns.
And if this works, ALL the rest will be doing the same thing within 5 years.