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Zero Motorcycles announced their groundbreaking new battery "technology", in which they sell you a large capacity battery in a motorcycle with powerful motors and advanced traction control systems, and then lock all that away behind a software paywall that you can unlock (for a fee) in their app.
https://newatlas.com/motorcycles/zero-motorcycles-2022-battery-paid-upgrades/
Zero is not the first vehicle company to do this sort of thing. Notably, Tesla sells vehicles with capabilities that can be unlocked via software "upgrades". This strategy is also common in the CNC machine tool industry; it's long frustrated machinists that they can buy a machine with all the hardware, but then have a sizable portion of memory, advanced motion smoothing, and other functions locked behind activation keys, which often cost several thousand dollars. In that industry at least, if you know the right people and have a machine with a common control, you can get what you need to unlock it through other sources.
I anticipate a similar approach in the vehicle market, which has long sold "tuner" chips and has a great deal of modding enthusiasts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJiXNzpRMY
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:47PM
Not just that, but anybody that buys this is losing a bit of efficiency lugging around the extra battery. The only way this makes sense is if it normally only charges to roughly 80% and this just allows you to go beyond that to something closer to 100%. This would extend the lifetime of the battery packs as they wouldn't be heated as much as if they were fully charged at 100%.
But, who knows, they might be idiots that just leave a bank of batteries that basically never charge, I could definitely see a company doing that.