Mercedes, the world’s renowned German carmaker has recently made international news because the company has quietly introduced a new upcoming subscription service that will charge Mercedes owners US$1200 (excluding taxes) per year to make their cars accelerate faster.
The subscription, listed on the company’s official North American market website, is not too subtly named “Acceleration Increase” and is coming soon to the brand’s Mercedes-EQ lineup of electric vehicles.
Acceleration Increase will bring subscribed Mercedes owners the privilege of their car’s full unleashed performance. Mercedes claims that with Acceleration Increase, subscribed owners will see a noticeable improvement in the acceleration in their currently owned Mercedes vehicles, specifically time saved of within 0.8 to 1.0 seconds(0-60 MPH).
Per Mercedes’ marketing material, Acceleration Increase also allows for the adjustment of the motor characteristic curve, torque and maximum output. Fine-tuning the electric motors increases the maximum motor output (kW) of owners’ Mercedes-EQ vehicles by up to 24%. In addition, the torque is also increased with the subscription, enabling your vehicle to accelerate noticeably faster and more powerfully.
Mercedes also published the company’s findings of improvements between paying and non-paying Mercedes-EQ electric vehicle owners. The table is shown below:
The subscription model sounds great on paper. Until you realise that these promised features that the annual subscription brings, are actually all features already available on the built-in electric motors of the Mercedes-EQ electric cars, but locked behind a paywall that requires money to unlock the vehicle’s faster acceleration.
In other words, non-paying Mercedes-EQ buyers and owners will have to relegate themselves to an inferior driving experience compared to annually-paying owners, because Mercedes will soon have acceleration-capped their driving experience behind the company’s outrageously expensive US$1200 annual paywall.
This is not the first time this decade that a famous car brand has gotten itself into a controversy after introducing a subscription service to its existing owners. The Verge reports that BMW had sparked outrage by similarly charging a US$18 monthly subscription in some countries for owners to use the heated seats already installed within the brand’s vehicles, just one of many features paywalled by the car manufacturer since 2020. BMW had previously also tried (and failed) to charge its owners US$80 a month to access Apple CarPlay and Android Auto — software features which other carmakers have included for its customers for free.
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