Write Your Congressman: Demand They Deliver the Whole Car, Not the Rest of It Later
A flagship goes on sale with its headline driving feature promised for a later date over the air and its digital features gated behind a terms screen and a linked account. Ask that a car sold today be a whole car today, at the curb, with the buyer's own key.
To the Honorable Member of Congress:
We write on behalf of the buyer's oldest and plainest expectation: that a car sold to him is a car delivered to him, whole, on the day he takes the key.
Read this week's lead. Mercedes has announced the most extensive update in the history of its grandest sedan, and set inside the announcement is a small sentence a reader could miss. By the maker's own words, the flagship's "CITY PRO" feature, the one meant to carry the car point to point through city traffic, "will be available at a later date via over-the-air updates." So the feature the car is sold with is not in the car the buyer drives home. It is coming. Later. On a schedule that is not his. The release adds that Digital Extras require, in its own language, "permanent acceptance of the Terms of Use," a linked Mercedes me account, and a signed-in owner before features already fitted to his machine will work for him. We do not charge that the car is broken, and we do not begrudge a maker its updates. We ask only who owns a car that is finished on someone else's calendar.
The trouble is bigger than one badge. The habit is spreading down from the flagship. A car goes on sale complete in the brochure and incomplete in the driveway, its best feature deferred to an update that arrives when it arrives, its ordinary functions held behind a screen the owner must accept again with every refresh. Buy the car, wait for the car.
We propose no statute. No law drafts a delivery date. We ask only for the whole car: every feature it was sold with working when the buyer drives it off the lot, today, with his own key, and not later, not over the air, not gated behind terms he re-accepts each time the software changes its mind. One purchase that arrives finished and stays his.
Demand they deliver the whole car, not the rest of it later. Write back to us when you have.
Respectfully, The Editors </content>