BUY NOW, PAY EXTRA LATER

You’ve just bought a new car. Great. Now it’s time to buy all the features you want. Welcome to the future.

I suspect the sales model that Volkswagen is set to introduce for the Project Trinity will cause some consternation. The concept of paying extra to use features that are already built into the car will be anathema to many.

You had better get used to it: Volkswagen may be one of the first to detail such a sales model, but it won’t be the last. When manufacturers talk about making cars more like smartphones, this is what they really mean.

With a smartphone, you buy the handset and then pay extra for many of the apps, games and services you want to use on it. That’s the future of car buying that Project Trinity outlines.

It’s a fundamental shift that changes what you’re actually paying for when you buy a car. Until now, that has been the hardware, but that’s changing in the EV age. What will perhaps differentiate cars in the future is the software that operates that hardware.

There should be benefits for buyers: greater flexibility to pick and choose features, and if your usage changes, you can add extra features later. It could also increase the lifespan of your car, through regular updates.

But there are even more benefits for manufacturers: cheaper, faster production and new revenue streams that continue after a car is sold. And that reason alone is why, like it or not, this is the future of car-buying.