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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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
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.
sticking with my 08 bimmer - before all this nonsense and buck teeth
Heated seats is my goto example as an attack on ownership. Good to see it stop but I don’t want your proprietary software or SaS either. Give me a dumb car with no computer.
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
“How do you know that people hated the heated seat subscription?”
BMW, if they were honest: “Ummmm… Jailbreaks? A lot of them? It’s impossible to enforce it because of them”
For once the car modding community got a giant W against a car maker
The gaming community could learn alot from BMW owners: when companies charge for bullshit services don’t pay for them and the company will stop doing it.
I just wonder how much of a market there is in fixing these issues for consumers. As in, giving people FULL ownership of their own cars…and to hell with ridiculous corporate “laws” like the DMCA.
Next: brakes subscription 😁
Look, it’s shitty that they’re putting this stuff behind a software lock and subscriptions just like the shitty practices of the gaming world but with shitty behavior comes opportunity with the cracking world.
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.
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 literally quoted this already lol
Someone will quote this any time shoes or products or money is mentioned. It’s damn near a second Godwin’s Law by this point
Hmm. This reaction has a very prescriptivist and strict attitude towards language… Hitler
First time I’ve ever seen it.
Idk if you mean the postin of the passage or Discworld books in general, but I highly recommend Discworld books.
Main reason I don’t mind this passage being everywhere is it gives me a chance to shill for Terry Pratchett
I’ve never seen this passage as a memetic device.
…that’s fine with me, actually. Hey, nice boots by the way.
I would love to see the sales metrics that made them backpedal
[…] 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.
Good. Wtf
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.
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.
No, they peaked in 2012, when the new Dacia Sandero was released.
Edit: I mean that, it was a car that you could buy new for under 10k€, built in Europe with a reliable engine and included literally nothing that isn’t needed to drive or required by EU regs. The base model had crank windows, no power steering and no radio. It was only available in white. like this generation’s Model T. I find that elegant in a way.
They’ll be back. And in greater numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is what a warranty is for.
Not all warranty is lifetime.
True, but not the point
It is the point when the subscription is paid for lifetime, but the warranty is not.
A subscription fee might make sense if it came with warranty coverage. If the fee is for using some heating elements you already have, but no promises they will actually keep working, then you are paying for something that doesn’t track any associated expense incurred on the supplier.
Is your point that warranty is part of the cost of the car and so they’ve already paid a substantial portion (for the lifetime of the car) of “the subscription”?
So you get free access to the features after the warranty runs out?
I suppose not, but you are mixing two things: a subscription fee and a warranty. They are differnt things.
I obviously agree that a subscrition model for a car hardware features, even if backed by software, is stupid but you are not paying to have it repaired if broken, you are paying for another thing: the use of it no matter how stupid the thing may be.
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?
