BMW Is Giving Up on Heated Seat Subscriptions Because People Hated Them

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.

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.

Pretty sure signal lights are a subscription option, and nobody that drives a Beemer has subscribed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Damn, who would've guessed people are tired of subscriptions?

Someone must've found an easy way to jailbreak their cars

Subscription based models is how they kill the second hand car market. No one will touch a BMW with a subscription off lease.

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.

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.

Next: brakes subscription 😁

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.

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.

No way, I cannot believe that didn't work. Shocked

Good, good, don't buy that shit people.

there was a subscription to pay for fucking heated seats?? even when you buy a car you dont buy a car

Good. Wtf

This is the sort of reason that we need the capacity to jailbreak cars, or install your own on-board computer system that controls car shit.

I want FOSS car software, or would if I drove.

That’s a big giant “no shit” from me.

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.

Good fucking ridiculous

BMW: "But we're going to keep the invasive data harvesting, though. I mean, Germans have never done anything bad with people's data, right? Tell them, IBM..."

Did anyone ever try splicing some wires to provide direct power supply to the heating elements? Then again, I wouldn't put it past BMW to make this brick the car due to "hEaT pIrAcY"

"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

They'll be back. And in greater numbers.

They heated them

Good!

At what point do we say, “enough is enough, a collective of employees and customers is taking control of the company, you are relieved of command”?

I am so sick of things getting worse and worse because people want to unfairly profit from selling us the solution to a problem that they caused.

I mean why did anyone buy a BMW during that time? Just worldwide no one buy any BMWs for five or ten decades. Let the brand tank.

I drive a car from 2000, it runs great, no spyware, no features in my car that I can't use, all I need to is add Bluetooth to the radio and its perfect. I don't really need a screen in my car to tell me basic information the dash gauges already tell me.

Toyota is doing this sort of thing too...

While petrol is an old form of subscription from car manufacturers and fuel stations

Didn't know HaaS Hardware as a service was a thing

Fuck them.

I will believe it when I see it. Next in news: BMW finds the line, decides to change tactics to a more critical function to charge rent

Read all about it in this month's issue of DUH.

Good! Fuck off with that bullshit!

When are they gonna give up on spying on their customers? Or do they want us to forget that?

Now do Zero Motorcycles.

Now you'll pay for it with your privacy. Facebook can't wait to their grubby hands on your cold ass data.

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fuck them and their bullshit

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WELL DUH

Does anyone know what the monthly fee for heated seats was? And what the permanent on option cost?

crab rave

duh

YEESSSS

Show this post to every person that thinks companies control their user base and not the other way around.

Get an Alfa Romeo already

I love my heated seat subscription. Keeps my tushy warm AND it makes me feel great that I can afford it and the lazy poors can’t.

We need to view this seperate issues:

One is putting all options into a car and only making them available to customers who pay. This somewhat makes sense, and while it is annoying, it might benefit customers and automakers alike.

The other is making a hardware option a subscription. I personally hate that, but it just might make sense. People also rent houses and lease cars, why not add some customisation?

There might be a third question: Why do people even buy Beamers?

So no more seat heating, then?