GM May Experiment with ‘Subscription Power’ for Your Corvette or Camaro
Subscription services are already available for some GM features, but could you also subscribe to more performance?
Our friends over at our sister site, CorvetteForum, have something interesting brewing. One forum member received an interesting survey and it has sparked quite a conversation.
The General Motors survey asks the recipient of they have interest in paying for upgrades to unlock features and performance from their car. You could almost think of it like how you subscribe to a satellite radio service. But for the Corvette or Camaro, it could end up being horsepower upgrades. An interesting proposition, so at LS1Tech, we got thinking.
Our first thought was; there’s one very obvious positive to this kind of scenario. Standardization of parts means things will be produced faster, and with a lower cost. Then depending on what performance level you want, you can simply have the GM dealership put in the appropriate software, and off you go in your faster ride. For features, it would likely be a one-time fee, but perhaps like satellite radio, it could even be monthly. Then you have to think about how the used car market. The car has every feature and none of them at the same time. It would be up to the next owner to ‘upgrade’ the car. Do the used car upgrades cost the same as when the car was new?
We do acknowledge that there are other significant drawbacks. In fact, we think there’s too many drawbacks to make it work for something like a Corvette or Camaro. For one, there’s simply too many interior trim and appointment options for any standardization to happen. A wide variety of seats can be had for the car, for instance. And there’s the fact that sports cars are bought by people who enjoy wrenching on their own ride. The thought of going to a dealership and having some 0’s and 1’s unlock a car’s speed could seem downright repulsive.
Forum members had already touched on the dealership issue, but in a slightly different way. One CorvetteForum user said:
“…we have had quite a few people here running into problems during the updates, and resulted in the updates failed and had to go into a dealer.”
So, as a worst case scenario, you could be downloading a new performance package for your car, and be left with no update at all, or even worse, a car you might not be able to drive.
We are sure GM has already put a good amount of thought into scenarios like this, but it is interesting that they ask owners if they’d like to download faster acceleration. It makes you wonder.
Photos: Chevrolet
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