This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it’s not the only way to buy the thing.

It’s available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it’s a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.

Why would you want computerized airbags? I don’t trust the software to not have bugs

Uhhh… Every single airbag is computerized. There is always some software involved in the evaluation of the acceleration data.

Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is acceleration >threshold: toggle airbag) is a much easier and reliabel process than:

Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is there an internet connection? is the subscription verified? is acceleration > threshold: toggle airbag)

Yes. Which is why the latter is not happening.

I’m not defending the subscription model, but that check is very obviously not done during the crash, but during startup, when a couple of seconds delay is not fatal. And if it fails I assume the entire thing just turns off completely.

So you stop for gas in the middle of fucking nowhere, the vest doesn’t get an internet conenction for veryfying your subscription and you are fucked, even as a paying customer.

It still boils down to a complex and much easier failing system, that could deny you critical safety features. I mean this also adds an entirely new dimension of hackability. Someone could hack into the server for the subcription verification and deliberately mess it up, or depending how poorly it is coded, could even access the vests of customers during their ride and disable them.

The system to trigger the airbag should never ever have a remote connection of any sort.

You gotta make sure you know what you’re criticizing before you criticize it. They try to contact you for a full month if you miss a payment, and even then if you happen to be on a ride when the subscription ends, it doesn’t deactivate the airbag. It won’t just stop working in the middle of nowhere because it doesn’t have a connection. The system to trigger the airbag is only connected to the system that checks the subscription in that when you turn the vest on pre-ride, the latter is what turns on the former. After you turn on the vest, it cannot deactivate the airbag until the vest is turned off and back on again.

Subscriptions are still absolutely shit, but you’re making assumptions about this product that aren’t true.