The monthly subscription model leaves me feeling so very conflicted. On one hand, it’s a way to get an important piece of safety equipment for less money up front, which is good—there’s certainly cheaper airbag vests, but there’s more expensive ones, too.
No, no, there's nothing conflicting here. If you need expensive safety equipment that you can't afford up front there's already a solution for that, it's called financing. There is no upside to this, it's just unethical, irresponsible, and dumb.
Here's a great vid on airbags for motorcycles
Fun fact the manual ones are better
Edit: He even mentions the one in the post about how it's a bad idea.
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.
What will be interesting is how a false negative plays out. A vest fails, someone dies yet the subscription is current: how does the lawsuit play out?
See, when a life-saving device can fail due to software bugs, our brains point to malicious negligence when it does fail. It's no longer a badly packed parachute but a company whose billing department wants to kill poor people.
Next up on the capitalism shit train:
Pay us or we fucking kill your family
Y’all trust the activation system?
It - meaning the activator, no comment on subscription - seems par for the course.
Hard to argue it couldn’t be at least marginally safer if remote disabling were impossible, though wonder if that’d be implemented for recall purposes as perhaps it is on modern vehicles? (Anybody know?)
Sorry grandma, you didn't pay for your oxygen tank subscription; we are turning off the taps
Of course it's made by KLIM. Someone is probably over on ADVrider right now vehemently defending this vest and it's whale foreskin leather.
I've known about this for a while and it's just been mundane to me. It never struck me how stupid it is until now.
Just buy the bungee corded one with the pull string that they make, that's probably better anyways.
Mate of mine said it was controversial but the subscription is to opt into their telemetry feedback system and improve the algorithm via firmware updates. When they go off when they shouldn't you're gonna have a bad time. He did not mention the remote bricking part, yikes.
I stumbled across this article when I saw this post. Not great, but not quite as bad as this post would lead us to believe. 👍🏻 (Also, subscription based services suck)
https://jalopnik.com/this-dystopian-biker-airbag-crash-vest-only-saves-your-1846823791
Klim could save a lot of bad pr by just blowing the airbag anyway and sending a bill for the remaining value of the vest after the fact.
But then you're just financing a vest and that's not a fancy buzzword that makes the c-suite cream their pants.
I use a 350€ manual airbag vest that was tested quite well
Literallly Cloudpunk irl
