You won't own your new battery car

A feature, not a bug: with room for just two car seats, population growth will be curtailed, and your children won’t be exposed to their friends’ covid bugs

German carmakers reimagining car “ownership”.

Volkswagen recently announced that it plans on making massive amounts of money by introducing more vehicles with over-the-air updates (OTAs), many of which will be able to store and transfer personal profiles so that users can effectively just rent their vehicles for eternity. Additionally, VW has suggested future models will have ability to lock features (that have already been physically installed) behind a paywall that users can unlock via subscription services — things like heated seats, satellite navigation, or even the vehicles top speed.

“In the future, our customers will buy, lease, share or rent cars just for a weekend, and we can use software to provide them with whatever they need over the air,” VW brand’s sales chief Klaus Zellmer said during an online presentation held on Tuesday. “The ID family has been designed for further development, with OTA updates to improve the software’s performance and tailor it to our customers’ needs.”

Other German automakers have pitched (or introduced) similar concepts over the last few years and it smacks of the terror that is the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” — a plan which envisions a near future were the general populace owns nothing and giant multinational corporations (and their heirs) effectively hold all the cards. It’s the kind of thing one might call you an unhinged conspiracy theorist for believing, until you head over to the WEC’s website to read a dozen or so articles explaining exactly how it’s to be implemented or notice that most Western governments seem to be pushing some variant of the “Build Back Better” campaign. The plot is often the same and hinges upon prioritizing stringent social controls, increased government spending, collaborating with large businesses/banks, and enhanced surveillance in exchange for some vague promises about public safety and environmental reform.

This ties in what I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Particularly on long –over a couple of hundred miles — trips, but also for the millions of car owners who live in cities and park on the street, or who can’t access a charger at work, electric cars will be useless. Yet, according to our masters, manufacturer of Internal combustion cars will cease by 2035, latest, and car makers will certainly have mostly switched to electric by 2030 — 8 1/2 years from now. I envision a massive rental fleet owned by the manufacturers themselves or, morel likely, Blackstone and its Wall Street peers, that will initially be parked at interstate highways. Drivers will pay upfront for their trip and switch cars with charged batteries every 3-4 hours or so: a 21st Century Pony Express.

From there, rental lots will spread through our cities, and by 2050, or sooner, the next generation will be further in thrall of the financiers.

Of course, they won’t own their own houses either, so they’ll be used to it. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.