We are entering the own-nothing-be-happy era of human history, and there's not a God-damn thing you can do about it because market forces are prevailing against you.
An example is computing. General purpose computing for the masses is moribund. The fundamental reason has little to do with the greed of OEMs (though that is very much a thing). It has a lot to do with the fact that end users don't want to be sysadmins. So they delegate the maintenance of their machine to the vendor. To keep costs down and the experience smooth, those vendors have an interest in restricting what can be run on their machines, and monitoring the machines' use to find problems (and run a side business selling that info to advertisers... the machines themselves are so low-margin, if not negative-margin that residual income for their use is a MUST to satisfy shareholders).
And so it's becoming the same for cars. People these days don't want to be responsible for a cars' maintenance, they just want to pay a sum for a few years' use of the car. Accepting that the vendor will take care of maintenance, as well as whatever restrictions the vendor chooses to implement, is still a win for the consumer. Therefore this model will dominate in the marketplace, and the option of owning your car outright will be like the option of owning a non-smart TV: not worth the money for manufacturers.
We are entering the own-nothing-be-happy era of human history, and there's not a God-damn thing you can do about it because market forces are prevailing against you.
An example is computing. General purpose computing for the masses is moribund. The fundamental reason has little to do with the greed of OEMs (though that is very much a thing). It has a lot to do with the fact that end users don't want to be sysadmins. So they delegate the maintenance of their machine to the vendor. To keep costs down and the experience smooth, those vendors have an interest in restricting what can be run on their machines, and monitoring the machines' use to find problems (and run a side business selling that info to advertisers... the machines themselves are so low-margin, if not negative-margin that residual income for their use is a MUST to satisfy shareholders).
And so it's becoming the same for cars. People these days don't want to be responsible for a cars' maintenance, they just want to pay a sum for a few years' use of the car. Accepting that the vendor will take care of maintenance, as well as whatever restrictions the vendor chooses to implement, is still a win for the consumer. Therefore this model will dominate in the marketplace, and the option of owning your car outright will be like the option of owning a non-smart TV: not worth the money for manufacturers.