Why do so many car makers have subscription fees on the cars they sell?

So they can continue to employ their devs, pay them well, and empower them to provide increasingly more value to you, the customer.

They're secretly funding the development of teleportation technology. Just a few more heated seat subscriptions and they'll have enough to stop selling cars and start charging by the mile.

Greed

The intent is to provide owners with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different features.

As for cost, carmakers selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-driver salary on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that owners have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via subscription.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Lemmy, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Automakers will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

It's to make the car more like a sub. But making a car marine-ready costs a lot of money, so to offset it, you need to pay a small amount every once in a while.

To allow the consumer to have a choice of the features that they want in the vehicle.
Subscription models for accessories allow users to opt out of things such as heated seats, parking sensors, Bluetooth connectivity, etc, if that's not something that the user determines is worth paying for. Alternatively the user could opt in to even more features than would normally be available.

The god of cars demands sacrifice according to the clergy of dealerships, 10% of drivers earnings per year. Tything is paid by subscription for your car's soul's convenience.

Cause consumers are not happy with paying for an item once. They want to buy it then continue to pay for nothing, just for fun.

Consumers love subscriptions.

The magic conch said so.

Depends on what those subscriptions get you. Paying a subscription to use your seat heaters? Nothing but anti-consumer capitalistic greed.

Having a subscription to stream music or live traffic updates to the car makes more sense. This means the car has to have a cell data connection and SIM card, which is an ongoing cost. It’s unreasonable to expect the manufacturer to eat the cost of a cell data plan for every car in perpetuity, so it makes sense to pass that cost on to the consumer.