Once they are established they will require a subscription, or they will stop support after a few years so you have to buy a new car or pay more to get extended support.
> Once they are established they will require a subscription, or they will stop support after a few years so you have to buy a new car or pay more to get extended support
> its how vendor lock in and deceptive pricing work
Which doesn’t work for a commodity. If self-driving fails to commoditise, you’re right. It currently looks like it’s going to be commoditises, with every car-industrial cluster having a couple options for manufacturers.
Self driving is not a commodity, because it is not fungible - you cannot take BYD's self driving and put in in your Tesla. Cars themselves are not fungible either although at the moment they are reasonably competitive markets for cheap cars (luxury cars less so).
If in two years time Tesla decides they are going to charge a subscription for self driving to work on cars sold before they decided to make it a subscription what do people who have those cars do? They can sell the car (hopefully), give up self driving, or pay up.
There are not that many manufacturers. Maybe few enough for pricing to be oligopolistic rather than perfect.
They may all adopt a subscription model which will let them sell cars cheaper. Maybe even at a loss - in much the same way that smart TVs are sold as a loss because of the value of the income generated by data collection. Most people do not understand the true cost of ongoing subscriptions so its quite likely to win if cars to cheap as a result.
Whatever it takes to extract more money from you.