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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

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    This is absolutely going to get somebody who had a subscription killed because the airbag couldn’t connect to the service to check in the 1/4 of a second it had to go off.

    • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      that’s absurd, it probably checks in periodically when it’s in range of service and then decides whether to brick itself. it’s going to get somebody who had a subscription killed because of a database error or bugged firmware update.

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Okay, so apparently there’s an indicator light at the beginning that tells you if your subscription is active. Presumably they have at least one person who passed their realtime programming course and it’s designed around making sure you never give off a green light unless the suit is ready to inflate.

        But a company that charges a subscription for airbag deployment may be too cheap to hire actual software engineers lmao

        • hotcouchguy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Surely the “subscription airbag” company understands design of safety-critical systems amd would not cut corners for the sake of profit.

        • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Presumably they have at least one person who passed their realtime programming course and it’s designed around making sure you never give off a green light unless the suit is ready to inflate.

          wheeze

        • RustCat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Presumably they have at least one person who passed their realtime programming course

          You guys have courses for that? I just set CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT=Y and go about my day.

        • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          i have but i was pretending not to for the purposes of the bit to play with some other failure modes, in truth i acknowledge that the possibility of that is not so absurd

    • Sinistar [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Honestly just having the airbag be electronic is dangerous enough. Imagine dying because you forgot to plug your airbag in a couple days in a row and the battery was out.

    • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The Ai-1 Airbag Vest and In&Box DPP (Detect-Protect-Perfect) platform is the first continually evolving motorcycle protection technology driven by artificial intelligence.

      absolutely-safe-capsule

  • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago
    1. It’s more of reskinned lease scheme. These are expensive devices, and you can either buy the whole device up-front, or you can buy a cheaper version and pay a monthly fee to make up the difference. Either $800 up front, or $400 up front + $12/mo or $120/yr for three years.

    2. There is no world in which you die because “your airbag’s ping is too high”. It checks your subscription once a day before you leave home; part of getting ride-ready is making sure your airbag is prepped. If you have no sub, the device warns you, the same as if the airbag was faulty or unready for any other reason.

    It’s absurd on the face of it, but I’m not sure it’s worse than a world where motorcyclists don’t get airbags if they don’t have $800 right now.

      • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
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        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.net
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          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.org
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            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.net
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              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.

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

      If you don’t like it, just shop around for another “unlock the doors to your burning car” service.

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        You jest, but this could be the basis for a class action of sorts.

        You own a car for what, 10 years? So for those 10 years, the car company has you by the balls. They can introduce new subscriptions or change your car’s computer in any way. And no one else can. Car companies should be forced to interoperable with other car operating systems and allow other companies to release competing services for that car brand.

  • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Shit at that point it would probably be safer to just bypass it manually, dig in there for the can and connect the valve to some piano wire or something, hook the other end onto your bike so it gets pulled automatically like a grenade if you leave your seat. The tripwire that saves you instantly