All of that will be accessible for third parties, because afaik it has to be in the EU. The cost is a different question, but I think that's not a surprise for BMW customers.
I don't see how "oh third parties can get a bit for it" is really an acceptable answer. Lightning cables are readily available but that wasn't consumer-friendly enough for the EU. I think the parent is right, let Ford try this and see how quickly the EU goes after them, because this is quite frankly very anti-consumer.
Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer with around 100 years of history, so yeah, I think the answer will be the same as for BMW. And sure, car makers have special status - they have just recently secured a huge win in reducing the scope of emmission-related fines, which will now be charged from 10g/km instead of 0g/km from 2035. But this too applies to every manufacturer.
I understand the legislation is different, but the anti-consumer sentiment is the same, but worse in this case since I have a feeling the screw bit won't be nearly as available and cheap as Lightning cables are.
> Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer
An American company with factories in the EU. I don't think it's the same as a company headquartered in the EU.
> No, anti-consumer sentiment is "you have to buy a different charger for each device and it becomes obsolete with the device".
But you don't? The other end of any Lightning connector is USB-A or USB-C. Works just fine anywhere.
> Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.
So I guess going back to the original parent's point: if your company is producing stuff in Europe, proprietary screws are just fine from a consumer point of view. Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations... they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
Can you name such a city? Even though I'm looking for a queen-bed hotel room I also always get suggested apartment style rooms in hotels (booking.com and similar) that would seem to be suitable in your case, both in Europe and in Asia. Actually in Asia it's more common to have some sort of basic kitchen corner even in small rooms than here in Europe.
I live in a not-so-dense European city (Bratislava) and several our neighbours here in the extended city centre order groceries online, although we have a small shop within 100m and supermarkets within 2km of driving. It's very convenient for parents staying at home, for example.
1. The EU de facto mandates the car manufacturers have to develop and sell cars that produce less CO2 (mostly by the way of fines for higher polluting vehicles). This led to the development of hybrid ('mild-hybrid', 'full-hybrid', and PHEV) and EV vehicles.
2. The manufacturers tend to both complicate the technology and lock the stuff down, so it's not easily repairable. This has its own enviromental price, and EV Clinic says this is not accounted for. That's not completely fair as on one hand there are EU repairability directives that address this but on the other we still want to have some degreee of market competition and in the end the market should punish those manufacturers (as it is already doing, I think).
One thing I want to add is that the EU also mandates real-world-fuel-consumption-measurement (OBFCM) devices in new cars and if that is followed to its logical conclusion and the manufacturers pressure is resisted, this will mean the end of hybrids as the real-world data is horrible for them.
Why? The former are just different typefaces (I learned to read them by myself when I was 10 while looking at our old books) and the latter I sort of picked up while travelling through Serbia and Bulgaria (I don't speak the languages).
> We don't have an information economy, we have a content economy.
We actually seem to have attention economy, that is the really valuable thing, not content. Mostly it's important what catches our attention first. This is also why counter speech does not work - it does not come first.
> If you want a market place of ideas, you have to figure out how to ensure its a FAIR market place.
Yes and that is obviously not possible at this time.
For the sake of my analogy, the issue I am focusing on is that we tend to think in terms of Information, when in reality (especially with GenAI) the fundamental unit of transaction is content. Information is content with a flag.
I found more traction shifting to thinking of content as the core unit of transaction, and attention the fuel burnt to consume content.
> When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs
And I'm glad they are using EVs, but also wondering if it's not mainly the tax writedown rules (in our country EVs are written down as investment to lower your taxes in 2 years vs. the standard 4 I think, and this can dramatically lower your tax base). But perhaps I'm overly cynical.
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