Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dronac 
I'm pretty sure there is no Corolla that features things like remembering seat/steering wheel position and adjusts for each driver / adjusts back during car entry/exit (Infiniti feature). Or no Corolla has proximity based unlocking and push button start so you effectively never need to even touch your keys (Infiniti feature). None of those are necessary, but they are pretty cool and nice to have if you have money to spend.
Those are not Infiniti features. They exist on many vehicles, and have been around for a long time.
Here's the thing about cars, especially new high end cars: Everything is computer controlled.
What that means is that manufacturers can enable and disable electronic features with the press of a button, literally. So, if you buy a new car and choose not to pay for the auto-adjusting seats, they just disable it in the software. It still has all the same power seats and all the other same hardware as the model that does have that feature. They just disable the "auto" portion in the computer.
That way its very fast and easy and cost effective for manufacturers to sell the same car with different feature sets.
Ultimately it's the consumers that lose (as always). If you don't pay for those features, then you're not getting the true full power of the device that you own. And if you do pay for those features, then you're paying more for the same hardware that you would have gotten anyway.
That is not directly the fault of patents... Mostly just corporate greed. There's no legitimate reason why those types of features should cost extra, since the production cost is exactly the same either way. And there's absolutely no reason why there should be any models with electronic features that are artificially permanently disabled, even though the hardware supports it.
