this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it's not the only way to buy the thing.
It's available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it's a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.
Thanks for the context but
I feel like price for the one time purchase is set deliberately high because they want people to actually pay for the subscription instead. If their goal really was to make their products more accessible, just allow people to pay in installments and take some recurring interest fees for the financing.
And, in any case, the product should work no matter whether I'm late with the monthly fee or not. That's just bullshit.
Also, do you need a persistent internet connection at all times so it can check if you're subscribed at any moment it may need to in case of a crash? In a fast-moving vehicle? What an awful idea.
If I recall correctly, it checks the status in the background every so often. It's not going to reach out for the status at the moment of impact.
Yeah, what happens with lag, does it deploy around your corpse or in the ambulance?
It checks status when you switch it on before your ride, and warns you with LEDs if it can't activate.
It won't ever switch off during your ride unless it runs out of battery.
It will continue to activate for 60 days after the last payment, then the “in motion” module (it’s not klim’s tech, it’s in motion’s tech and subscription) won’t turn on before a ride. It doesn’t need to connect to the internet to work while riding, it syncs over wifi. They specify it won’t stop working during a ride.
Also, you can still buy the system outright. Having a subscription entitles you to a new detection module after three years though
That is bullshit. If they want to lower the price by renting it out, they could perfectly well licencese local dealers to rent it out, who can go after the customer in the same way, like they could for people who rented vehicles and didnt pay/return them.
The subscription based model instead proves that the production costs cannot be that high, that in case of a run out subscription, they'd rather lose the product.
Also the development costs of the subscription and the technical equipment to validate subscriptions, including running the servers etc. are a significant cost factor, without which they could lower the price of the product.
Why would you want computerized airbags? I don't trust the software to not have bugs
Uhhh... Every single airbag is computerized. There is always some software involved in the evaluation of the acceleration data.
And noone trusts the software to not have bugs. That's why testing exists on many development levels.
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is acceleration >threshold: toggle airbag) is a much easier and reliabel process than:
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is there an internet connection? is the subscription verified? is acceleration > threshold: toggle airbag)
Yes. Which is why the latter is not happening.
I'm not defending the subscription model, but that check is very obviously not done during the crash, but during startup, when a couple of seconds delay is not fatal. And if it fails I assume the entire thing just turns off completely.
So you stop for gas in the middle of fucking nowhere, the vest doesn't get an internet conenction for veryfying your subscription and you are fucked, even as a paying customer.
It still boils down to a complex and much easier failing system, that could deny you critical safety features. I mean this also adds an entirely new dimension of hackability. Someone could hack into the server for the subcription verification and deliberately mess it up, or depending how poorly it is coded, could even access the vests of customers during their ride and disable them.
The system to trigger the airbag should never ever have a remote connection of any sort.
Once it's activated, it won't turn off for any reason, except if you turn it off or it runs out of battery.
So you could turn it off by accident, or it runs out of battery, or you stay the night somewhere on a longer road trip and it fails to reactivate in the morning because lack of internet connection. The issue still stands that there is another layer of failure that can also deny the product to paying customers for infrastructure problems that are out of their control.
You gotta make sure you know what you're criticizing before you criticize it. They give you two months to reactive your subscription, and even then if you happen to be on a ride when the subscription ends, it doesn't deactivate the airbag. It won't just stop working in the middle of nowhere because it doesn't have a connection. The system to trigger the airbag is only connected to the system that checks the subscription in that when you turn the vest on pre-ride, the latter is what turns on the former. After you turn on the vest, it cannot deactivate the airbag until the vest is turned off and back on again.
Subscriptions are still absolutely shit, but you're making assumptions about this product that aren't true.
Shit sorry update 3900.12 that introduced buy now pay later at the checkout actually broke that logic. Customer service got reports that it actually does turn off that fail-safe, mostly from relatives of deceased and coroners.
Discussed in sprint meeting this morning and it was agreed the upgrade can't be rolled back due to agreements with vendors so the bug remains in production. Will be fixed in an upcoming release tbd.
It's even worse because if you have an issue with the activation, your airbag is useless even though you are a customer.
But a security device should not come with a subscription, period. If you want to make the barrier of entry lower, offer differed payments.
Uhhh... not motorcycle airbags. See the Helite Turtle 2 airbag.
It's argue it still shouldn't even be a "subscription". A payment plan would be a simpler and more safety-conscious implementation. If the buyer fails to keep up with required payments, then you're focused on collections, not disabling functionality.
The seller could even just not offer payment plans, because plenty of other third parties already specialize in personal loans. They're just reinventing a stupider wheel.
What is important to remember is that subscription doesn't save you money, it delays payment.
Subsceiptions do NOT make things cheaper, they only lower barrier to entry and then allow to drain you even for the cash you don't have. Similar to how credits changed the world, but way more sinister.