Mercedes is taking on the hellish tactics pioneered in this video game industry by offering owners of its Mercedes-EQ line of electric cars the "opportunity" to pay a hefty annual fee for faster 0-60 mph acceleration. This can be set up in either an EQS or EQE car, which can improve acceleration from 0 to 60 by 0.8 to 1.0 seconds.

As reported by The Drive (opens in new tab), Mercedes is asking $1,200 per year to "accelerate more powerfully: increase the torque and maximum output of your Mercedes EQ."

To be clear, this is unacceptable and highly unreasonable. It is a common parody of corporate greed. This is charging for software updates that fine-tune the electric motor to more optimally adjust the torque of the vehicle. It is not an expensive, sprawling cloud computing service that requires moment-by-moment calculations to be delivered to the vehicle. Unless you pay a subscription, you are artificially limiting the power of the machine that someone else has paid for.

Mercedes' cash grab came after BMW's controversial willingness earlier this year to pay to use the car's heated seats (opens in new tab). Physical features of the car. A simple piece of physical equipment. People countered this by pirating the seat heaters. (open in new tab)

Both of these things are maddening and I hope this kind of sociopathic "innovation" never returns to the PC game. imagine how happy Nvidia and AMD would be if they sold services to "speed up" graphics cards. I wish Intel would offer a subscription to "unlock two cores!" on their CPUs. to the CPU.

Frankly, just thinking about it makes me angry.