Related discussions from 2 days ago:

- “BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026

- “BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066565

This again.

They’re not giving you the heating hardware for free.

They’re selling you the heated seats and then selling you the ability to turn them on separately.

Not to mention the arbitrage opportunities. BMW are now the only car dealer network that can trade cars back without features and then add them in for no cost before they go back out on sale.

...or turn them off and get used car buyer to pay for them yet again.

Rent seeking MBA fuckers.

The only hope is that the market punishes them. The problem is that if every company does this then they act as a cartel and stop the market working correctly.

> And Kurt Opsahl, general counsel of digital civil liberties campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tweeted: "A seat heater blocked by software is broken, and the car owner should have the right to repair their seats."

Spot on.

There should be absolutely no penalty for circumventing whatever DRM is causing these BMWs to be broken.

Mistitled. Should read "German Automaker Pimps Your Ride to Monetize Hot Ass at Scale"

Paying for features to be unlocked is not new, especially in IT, but with a car it just feels wrong somehow. The hardware is there, but not in a sense when you buy a PC without an OS, because that's a multi-purpose machine, you give it context. Heated seats are dedicated hardware, they're there for one purpose only, they're already in your car and you already paid for the expense of making them and continue paying for gas to haul those heavy hunkers around, increasing emissions. Maybe not much per car, but taking into account a bunch of cars, I just see this as reckless.

I can sure as hell guarantee they didn't charge them the same amount as regular seats with the hope of you buying their subscription. The software effort is likely next to none, if any.

What makes it even funnier is that the one-time payment for a steering wheel is 200 pounds, which is roughly what you would pay for it as additional equipment, if not less. Why funking around with the customer?

I remember the days, you bought the car and it came with heated seats. They will slowly push this model until the public thinks this microtransactions are normal. Gaming is a good example of how predatory it will become. Just look at Diablo Immortal.

>The company says customers can enable all hardware features for a one-time payment if they prefer.

As long buying them once and for all exists, it's just a new option.

It might be cheaper for BMW to install these features to every car than manufacture different cars with different options.

Even for a buyer who don't want to rent, ability to buy features later is nice option.

Funny how Ars was "fact checking" this the other day saying "it was only in South Korea"

Blink once again and they will be at your neck

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/no-bmw-is-not-making-he...

As an eastern European I can assure you the local mechanics will offer a kit to circumvent this eventually. Might be a simple hardware switch somewhere on the dashboard - third owners aren't choosers.

Automakers already tune the exact same engine to different power depending on trim level and that is also routinely worked around.

Those are the first signs of the beginning of the end for personal transportation as we know it. Car ownership as a whole is inevitably moving towards a subscription model. Which in turn obsoletes car ownership, which in turn will lead to a different transportation model altogether. It will probably still take decades but this here is where it starts.

I find it amazing that governments can spare the time to regulate phone charging ports but completely fail to address this sort of gouging. If I buy hardware that can do one thing, I should not have to pay a license fee to enable that thing.

This is anything but new. In Germany BMW sells cars since years, where the engine power is throttled by default and the throttling can be disabled for an extra fee. Former colleges of mine are working on the business side of this, trying to figure out the sweet spot for the fees, managing marketing campaigns through every possible digital channels, etc. Serving the devil pays well btw...

I always thought these rental models would be great if they gave you the hardware for free. Not having hundreds of configuration options would be an advantage for buyers and manufacturers. And you'd only pay for what you're using. But there should always be the option to buy the feature outright and charging for hardware and a subscription is obviously greedy.

Related discussion from 2d ago about S.Korea. But I think I read another article (also linked on HN, but can't find it - maybe URL was changed) that didn't mention this to be market-specific.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026 2d ago, 377 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066565 2d ago, 122 comments

(Not to diminish your link, but maybe the other discussions are interesting for those interested in the topic)

This is not new for BMW. I have a 2016 and if I want my phone app to work, like location or open/close the doors it's a subscription. And Apple carplay was also a subscription. I tested the app the first year and was so bad... and try to enter am email and app with a wheel to scroll all alphabet just to login in the car. Horrible interface. Once I closed the doors in the app and they never closed. They are not getting new costumers. So they need to find a way to get money from the current owners.

I test drove a used 2019 BMW. It didn't have features that are quite common, such as Android Auto and adaptive cruise control.

On the one hand, I would have liked the option to turn those features on.

On the other hand, once you factor in how much all those extras cost, BMW would lose on price.

I guess they've always relied on people who are willing to pay more for a BMW. But now they can sell a base model for a price similar to other manufacturers, and win customers who value the BMW brand over features, then charge for upgrades later.

I'd pay $5/month for navigation but that's it. Yes my Android Auto does it but it's nice if I want to rest my phone or just don't take it.

Isn’t the story here that they are _renting_ you the heated seat?

It’s not like there is any additional service burden on their end that justifies renting it. It’s obviously disgusting, rent seeking practice. But we’re used to manufacturers selling artificially limited products due to economies of scale… and can probably even tolerate it.

But _renting_ you the damn extra? Will intel now rent me an extra few hundred peak mhz too?

The 3 series I owned will likely be the most fun car I'll ever own, but the maintenance was always a multi thousand bill a couple times a year. Even a decade ago they were already charging a couple hundred for map upgrades, not that I paid for them. Personally, I'm going to stay away from German vehicles in favor of Japan, Korea and maybe Ford.

Now this could be a fake story, ie check your car seats have the elements to heat the seats or enquire with your dealer if your car has this facility, the press will keep stuff quiet if they need to, but if these heated seats do exist in your car and you are a good enough hacker, then you just a got a Brucie Bonus if you play your cards right!

I knew a guy who built a very profitable business hacking BMW software. Most of BMW dealers and especially used car dealers in Eastern Europe are his clients, his exploits are used on most new and used cars - he started with simply reducing mileage recorded, but proceeded to hack everything else.

With this new thing i guess, he'll become a billionaire.

Well, at least now one can call every new BMW a rental.

I wonder what that will do long term for the perception of the brand.

"Yeah it's a decent looking car, how much is the rent per month?"

Apart from people doing so by mistake (didn’t read the fine print), shouldn’t this sort if thing be enough to discourage almost all buyers? Seems like a huge risk.

Just a what-if thought experiment:

What if BMW announced they will perpetually donate all of the proceeds to some real charity organizations?

Would we still be opposed to this subscription?

As you can buy it out-right for £200, I'm not too fussed. If you could only rent it then that would bother me a lot more.

This was also a thing on a land rover I rented recently. It could only be remote started via app with a $45/month subscription.

Capitalism is truly a race to the bottom (pun intended).

Linux for cars? when?

How much is it to buy outright?

That does it, I'm canceling all my BMW orders.

How To Kill Your Sales In One Simple Step

Passing the hot seat to the brits

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