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Tweet: Okay I thought this one straight up has to be hyperbole, there’s no way they’d make an airbag that checks your subscription status or it doesn’t go off, but it’s fucking TRUE: “Without the subscription service from In&Motion, the airbag system is non-operational.”

Quoted tweet: Reminder that Klim makes a motorcycle airbag vest that has a subscription service and if you don’t pay and get in a wreck it just doesn’t go off

Google results screenshot: Ai-1 Airbag Vest (Klim) - Choose from $12/month or $120/year subscription options, which include…

Original tweet dated 30th April 2021

    • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      In your opinion, would it be better if the lease scheme didn’t exist, and the only way to have one at all was to pay $800 up front?

      Again, it’s not like it’s going to catch you by surprise. You are alerted well before you ever even get on your bike, as you’re putting the vest on, that it’s inactive. You have to make the choice to ride with an inactive vest. It doesn’t check your payment status mid-crash or shut off mid-ride. Other vest manufacturers only offer a full-price one-time-purchase. These guys have gone out of their way to make it more accessible to people who can’t pay $800 up front. If they simply never checked, people would just buy the vest for “half price”, and the company quickly couldn’t afford to offer it. They’ve made it as safe as possible while not letting themselves go out of business. I’m not sure what else you want them to do.

      • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Gonna be honest, I just don’t think this is an appropriate model for an air bag. Disabling a potentially life saving device just because someone didn’t pay money is kind of a shitty thing to do no matter how you look at it.

        If someone rents something monthly and stops paying partway through, we already have existing systems in place to deal with this sort of thing. Let it keep working and deal with it through the proper channels.

        • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          What’s the functional difference between “disable the vest remotely” and “send repo men to take the vest away”? In either case, you no longer have access to the air bag, but in the former case you can resume paying for it much more easily. I would personally far rather a “subscription” than a traditional lease; I can stop paying when I don’t need the thing or can’t afford it, and seamlessly resume using it when I need to and have money.

          • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            What’s the functional difference between “disable the vest remotely” and “send repo men to take the vest away”?

            If there’s no functional difference then why turn it off? It’s unnecessary bullshit that had to be designed and would have cost them nothing to not do in the first place. Why spend more money and make it more complicated for no gain? And you’re even opening up security vulnerabilities by letting it connect to the internet.

            I would personally far rather a “subscription” than a traditional lease; I can stop paying when I don’t need the thing or can’t afford it, and seamlessly resume using it when I need to and have money.

            I would rather there not be any sort of subscription model for fucking safety equipment. If your netflix subscription expires because you’re broke that’s one thing, it won’t kill you, but for equipment that is designed to save lives, turning it off because someone is poor is fucking barbaric, especially when it would have cost them nothing to leave it turned on.