BMW Is Giving Up on Heated Seat Subscriptions Because People Hated Them::The blowback worked—but subscriptions for software-based new car features will continue, according to a BMW board member.
Going forward, BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.
The fuck it is. You offer car features at time of sale. And if you want me to like your brand, at best you offer OTA or wifi updating for free to enhance the experience, and make me want to buy your next car.
You try and nickel and dime me for shit technology that has been around for 20 years, and I could give two fucks. I’ll plug in my phone, ignore your entire. Infotainment and actively campaign for it to fail and blow up in your face.
They’re just trying to recoup the cost of being forced to install turn signals even though their drivers don’t need them.
They’re recouping the costs of hiring an in house orthodontist to fix all them buck tooth grills they made.
They’re hideous. I feel bad for all the people that were finally in a financial position to afford an M3/M4 and have to drive around that monstrosity.
Do they try to fool themselves into thinking it looks good?
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You know you can buy literally the cars you wanted as a teenager right?
Staying on the BMW thread, you can get a mint E46 or E9X M3 for a fraction of the cost of the new ones. Just gotta find one where the owner has taken care of it and kept service records.
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Preach
I mean the 3/4 is… questionable. But have you seen the 7/X7…? Not to mention the godawful monstrosity that is the XM? Like… what the actual fuck were the designers thinking? And moreover, what fucking imbecilic marketing yahoo thought it was a good idea to unabashedly bastardize literally everything that ///M division was supposed to be about since it’s inception? Like, honestly, I don’t view it as a real “performance” (sub)brand anymore. It’s that bad.
I actually prefer the 7 series over the 3 series looks. They’re both ugly, but at least the grill on the 7 series fits on the front of the car. The 3/4 series has to extend the hood upwards to fit the grill.
Hilarious if you look at the X5 it has a M package… which is just some cosmetics at this point.
😔 I really wanted an M4 but my oh my are they fugly.
What’s sad is that the motor is amazing, and the rear end and 3/4 view is beautiful. That front though instantly ruins it. It could have been an amazing car, but that front is just awful.
My running theory for Audi is they started uniquely animating their indicators so people would use them. Not because they should, but because it made them feel special. Thus reducing the stereotype before getting to BMW levels.
I’m driving BMW and use turning signals 🙈
Of course a BMW driver would be driving while commenting on the Internet.
You are absolutely right 😁
I use my left one. My right one has a fault, it needs replacing but the replacement has the same design fault. So, fuck bm in that regard.
Agreed, subscriptions only make sense when there is an on-going service, like on-star (no idea if it is worth anything).
So if the digital assistant and driver assistance programs where getting service updates, then this would make sense. However, I’d say that driver assistance really shouldn’t need a lot of updates if it was truly ready for the road.
I agree. Some subset of ADAS are using things like LIDAR mapping data that do incur ongoing cost. For example, Ford relies on road having recent LIDAR data to let you take your hands off. So they have a subscription, and if you don’t pay… Well it’s almost the same except your hands have to stay on. It is vaguely less competent, but still pretty much follows the lines/traffic on its own.
Of course their pricing is way more than I think will work out, but I can at least understand why a subscription fee is associated.
The argument I could maybe see is that their seemingly fine ADAS system is at higher risk of being hit with a mandatory recall down the road. Those generally ignore all warranty limitations (e.g suddenly having to replace airbags in 15 year old cars…), but might spare them the expense for those who lack the features, or at least the revenue from the users helps fund the possibility of converting a related recall.
I’ll plug in my phone, ignore your entire. Infotainment and actively campaign for it to fail and blow up in your face.
This sounds kind of funny. “I’ll spend $60,000 on your car but I won’t turn on the radio. That’ll show you!”
More like “if this car is otherwise the best option, I’ll go for it, but your policies are actively having me court your compeititors and damaging brand loyalty.”
Maybe. I feel like it’s going to be kind of hard to make them care if you’re still buying their product though.
It is never “otherwise the best option” because abusive tactics like this are instantly and totally disqualifying. Period.
The line must be drawn here.
radio does suck, but its also a vital information system during emergencies. what liabilities does a manufacturer open themselves up to by refusing access to a potentially lifesaving device?
I think you might have misunderstood the post? There wasn’t anything about the manufacturer disabling the radio. The person I replied to said they’d choose not to use the car’s fancy features and I thought it was funny they’d do that to “spite” the manufacturer after giving them a whole bunch of money.
Enshitification will continue until morale improves
Luxury car makers will have a harder time justifying a high price tag when an electric Kia will match their 0-60.
Mark my words, cars will be the next common planned obselesence product. As soon as the battery doesn’t take a charge people will junk it and buy another just like the phone market.
Also you have Chinese BYD making huge inroads in various markets now. They’re going to massively drop the price floor for features that are seen as luxury right now.
I’ll plug in my phone, ignore your entire. Infotainment and actively campaign for it to fail and blow up in your face.
Jokes on GM customers, they announced they would no longer support apple carplay or Android Auto, and customers would instead need to buy functionally through GM.
We all said the same thing about subscription streaming services 5-10 years ago and now look where we are. Nothing we can do unless the masses stop buying this bullshit
sticking with my 08 bimmer - before all this nonsense and buck teeth
Did cars peak around 2016? That’s when you could get a plug in hybrid, with Bluetooth audio, a rear view camera, but no spyware or mandatory subscriptions. Sure they’d pester you to get SiriusXM but you could just say no.
I’m not sure I’d agree on no spyware. Systems like OnStar are still tracking locations and are deeply integrated into the car. But at least this is before they subscription-ized basic features.
Pretty sure signal lights are a subscription option, and nobody that drives a Beemer has subscribed.
If you ever feel like your just a cog spinning endlessly in a machine with no real purpose in your career, remember that there is a man in Germany who has a job installing turn signals on BMWs.
Ironically the BMWs here in Germany tend to use their signals in my experience
Might be, but the majority of drivers is constantly ignoring safety distance and trying to butt-fuck me on the Autobahn. I used to like BMW when I was younger, but I decided I will never buy that brand because I don’t want to be associated with the majority narcissistic assholes group that is BMW drivers.
Maybe it’s not trickled down yet but I can assure you the Tesla drivers are now the worst in the UK. It was Audi.
must be a pretty busy guy if he has to install them in all those cars
Signalling is trickle down bullshit that only helps those who come after you. You don’t buy a BMW because you want to help others.
Funny thing is, they do help you. Sure, there’s assholes who see a signal as a sign that they need to speed up to prevent a lane change, but there are plenty of people who will see the signal and let you in, at least in my area. My own rule of thumb is if I don’t have to slam on my brakes to let you in, I’ll slow down for you, especially if you’re a semi.
Unless I know you pulled into an onramp lane just to skip ahead of the people not doing that bullshit when it’s stop and go level traffic. But it’s usually hard or impossible to tell who is an asshole and who is just using the onramp because they just got on the highway and I try to leave space for people just getting on.
I have a BMW motorbike, it’s a tiered subscription, the level I’m on allows for 10 flashes per month 😁
They all run out of fluid and never bother refilling it.
give up
No. That’s not what companies do.
BMW and Mercedes were the “leaders” in milking their customers and thus they got the most bad press. All BMW is doing is waiting until more companies start doing this and the whole idea of subscriptions in the car business becomes normalized to the public.
Unless consumers continue to shun this concept and the press blasts these companies for trying to push this nonsense, it will make a comeback in the years to come. Unfortunately, I simply do not think consumers will look at their long-term interests. Its like telling gamers not to pre-order the hottest upcoming releases because it encourages companies to release buggy software… all the pleading in the world ends up falling on deaf ears. Same too, I believe, will happen in the car market.
Not to mention that it’s clear that they don’t want to sell cars to individuals anymore. That’s what all these subscription models point to. They are hoping to sell fleets of autonomous cars to corporations and cities, and us plebes can rent them when we need them. The upside for the manufacturer is that now they have the ecosystem to charge an extra $5 for A/C per ride, $3 for the radio, and $10 to roll down the windows.
HA, I read the title and thought “what is going on? I love my seat warmers” - I completely overlooked the word subscription because it is absolutely absurd that there would be an ongoing cost to the consumer for a feature that provides no ongoing cost to the manufacturer.
It occurs to me that all of these feature subscription models never seem to mention maintenance. Is that correct? Like, Ford wants to make a car that will deactivate the radio and blare annoying noises at you like you’re a fucking cat if you miss a payment, BMW and Lexus are gating performance and heated seats behind subscriptions and paywalls… But all you get is access. They arent going to fix the heated seats if a coil burns out. They aren’t going to fix a spun bearing you incur while using the extra performance you paid for. They aren’t going to repair a blown transformer in the radio. So you are literally paying for nothing. I am so glad I have an '07 Mustang Convertible. If I keep it maintained and looking good, the value will skyrocket when they actually standardize all of this abusive shit.
Of course, then somehow “Cash for Clunkers” will come back and be even less “voluntary” and suddenly most cars made before ~2018 will be removed from the road and bricked.
Your 07 mustang is ICE so in the next 3 decades will lose all value.
No, it’ll become a hot enthusiast pick when everything is electric, especially if it’s a manual. There are a lot of car enthusiasts who swear by the “feel” of an ICE sports car.
How would you get fuel for it?
no ongoing cost to the manufacturer
The “ongoing cost” is manufacturing diversity. It costs more money to put heated seats in one car and not in another than it does to put them in all of them and allow the people who want them to simply pay to activate them.
That being said, it is a fixed cost, and should be a one-time purchase. Or at least offered as an option. At least Tesla does this correcrly.
I hate everything about the idea of paying a subscription for a…{checks notes}…car. It’s already bad enough when people are paying monthly for car payment or lease payment, now they get hit with a subscription for software?
I hate this timeline.
just passing by, just wanted to say i liked your content a lot.
- your username, ‘Charles Darwin’.
- the ‘checks notes’, bc you feel like a tired medician raising a brow when reading the umpteenth diagnosis report of ‘stupidity’ in this world.
- the ‘i hate this timeline’, bc our actions made us end in one of the world’s bad ends.
so please, take my upvote and my upcomment, and have a nice day.
Now kiss
it’s admiration, not necrophilia! Charles Darwin is dead!
No need to kink shame
Since they’re kink shaming themselves, I can only surmise that shame is another one of their kinks, in which case shame
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masochistic self-kink shaming? i’ll take it!
what if i feel a sadistic kink about king shaming others’ kinks? my kink should be respected then, right? evil laugh
What if I told you that you can get rid of all those monthly payments by signing up for our service. For only one all inclusive monthly fee you can pay all of them, including a service fee. Terms and conditions apply. Sign up today!
ain’t that a bargain ?
Uhh, you forgot about your insurance cost, tag fee, and driver’s license fee.
Man we keep running into each other.
What’s wrong with leasing a depreciating asset? Never own large assets that are sure to lose value. Even if it’s like a work truck that makes you money, let someone else’s books take the loss.
With vehicles, lessors get you on the overage miles. Negotiate it. When you turn the lease over, tell them you need to lease another one and you’ll do it with them if they waive the overage. If they won’t do it, go somewhere else. They won’t let you walk out the door without hacking away much or all of the overage.
?
I was not taking issue with leases, just commenting on the notion of a cost over and above a lease/car payment.
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Such subscription models essentially beg to be hacked and/or for third parties to come up with entire replacement computers for the vehicle that bypass entirely all of the locks.
Subaru did this with remote start. Instead of just selling you the damn option you have to pay a subscription. Fuck that I’ll just walk outside and start the car…
Yeah, I wouldn’t want a car without e.g. a trip computer. But I also defintly don’t want a “smart car”.
Do you mean the old mechnical trip computer, or are you refering to trip with software-only features?
The modern one, but the offline version.
Do people install Linux on it? :D
BMW really doesn’t understand this business model. They tried to pull this shit with CarPlay in 2018 as well. Which one could buy as an €300 option, which was rediculous by itself, but was later moved to a fucking subscription.
It also caused a huge uproar, largely forgotten by Covid now, but they also had to backtrack that. And now they’ve tried it again, also to backtrack again.
Fix your cars to be a better value prop than that fuckface’s or the Chinese cars. Then you’ll make tons of money. Not by nickel and diming your customers.
No, you’re not understanding.
They save money by only producing the luxury model. Then they disable the feature electronically.
But to prevent you from just jailbreaking the car, they need to have a system to monitor your status. So they need to be able to check and update software that you can’t control, etc etc.
It’s still greed, but it’s like greed with extra steps.
People were objecting to the subscription, but they should have been objective to the locked features.
They’ll never stop the shitification, it maximizes profit.
People were objecting to the subscription, but they should have been objective to the locked features.
Why though, if it’s cheaper? Do you rather pay for features you don’t use or pay to remove features?
If the features are in the car I have, I paid for them.
Yes, and no. Imagine it costs $20/car to install seat heating in every car, but by making two assembly lines, one for with and one without it every car becomes $25 more expensive. Software disabling costs $1/car. In this scenario it would cost more to make a car without physical seat heating than one with. This is just an extreme example to show the problem, with other costs it can be more complicated, but the principle stands.
The issue is that it’s not that people express do not want the option, it’s just that if it is cheaper, they might go without.
In other products I’ve been involved with, the dilemma crops up. 90% of our customers pay for a premium feature, or else the feature has become so cheap it hardly saves us anything, we decide “guess everybody gets the feature”.
The argument that I might be willing to accept is when a feature carries a very large development expense, and you want to defray the cost among those that demanded it, both as a different model for funding the development and for keeping track of waning interest to discontinue that effort. Related are things like patent royalties and licensing fees.
However, we are taking about some resistive heating elements in a chair, hardly an engineering marvel and not really subject to a limited set of demanding supplier nor an area to run afoul of active patents. Once safety regulations got to the point where manufacturers had to run wiring to the seats anyway for the airbag modules, the hearing elements become negligible cost. A lot of budget models even shrugged and just tossed the feature in at that point. In that context, is crazy that a premium brand would think to pull such an obnoxious move.
Look at you thinking they put components you haven’t paid for in your vehicle. Sweet summer child. You do know what profit is right? That’s the money after everything is paid for, they don’t sell them without making a profit.
I never said that. Of course you pay for everything that’s in your car, but it’s certainly possible it would cost you more not to have them put it in there, that’s the crux of the matter.
Pretty sure ‘cheaper’ is a misnomer when profit exists.
💀
I want to own the car I just paid a lot of money for either way - that means all of the car.
I’d pay more for cars which are modular, like computers.
Cars are built on assembly lines, unlike any modular computer
What are you suggesting?
It’s harder to sell a modular product off an assembly line.
You mean more expensive to design, and sell the parts rather than sell as a whole?
Just a reminder that if consumers hate it enough, they can have the power to change those decisions. If they or content or “don’t care” they are passively agreeing and allowing it continue. Let your voices be heard, share articles like the Mozilla investigating car companies that collect your sex life and biometrics. Let your representatives know.
I would love to see the sales metrics that made them backpedal
This has to end, somehow. Or pretty soon we will have shoes with soles subscription: you want a proper shoe, you will have to pay a monthly quota.
Modern-day low-quality shoes are already kind of a walking subscription
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
I always think of Ben Stein’s comment in that Frontline episode on the Secret History of the Credit Card - people that pay off their credit cards every month and pay no interest are called “deadbeats”. Around the 11m 30s mark…as it goes for credit cards, it goes for so very many other things. If you can afford an upfront hit or what have you, you pay less than people that are in a worse financial situation.
Terry Pratchett said it best!
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Someone must’ve found an easy way to jailbreak their cars
I was going to say it wasn’t that people hated them, I was thinking it was BMW users either didn’t want to pay or found a buddy to do it for free.
there was a subscription to pay for fucking heated seats?? even when you buy a car you dont buy a car
“Turning the engine on between midnight and 6AM is a premium feature. Subscribe now for only $29 per month. BMW. Sheer driving pleasure.”
“He’s losing blood!! Quickly, we need to get him to a hospital!!”
Car assistant: “Oh, boy. I smell an easy upsell.”
[…] but subscriptions for software-based new car features will continue, according to a BMW board member.
I wonder what they’re going to try to nickel and dime people over next. I mean, if they’re offering internet service/access or other things that are an ongoing service, fine. That’s mostly fair… but if they’re charging you to flip a bit in the car’s internal database (or even worse, a central database somewhere that keeps your car’s data) but the feature is installed in your car and costs BMW nothing to enable it, then ewwwwwww
Took a deeper look at the article…
[…] BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.
Hahahahahaha no. For the most part, absolutely no.
Seems a little bit like when your cell phone carrier disables the tethering feature on your phone and wants to charge you money to enable that. For me, infuriating to know that I’d paid to have hardware capable of being a wifi hotspot, then to be charged to use it. The “service” being provided amounts to first-we-degrade-the-thing-you-paid-for, then we-charge-you-ransom-to-get-it-back.
