BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

&gt; People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality<p>It <i>was</i> true. The heating wires in the seats were already installed and the consumer paid for them and owned them.<p>I remember in the olden days some compiler vendors added a fee to &quot;unlock&quot; floating point code support. That was never popular (I never did such with my compilers.)

&quot;We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double, which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that,&quot; Nota told Autocar.<p>Wow. They still don’t get it

Meanwhile, Mercedes is still charging for full rear wheel steering in Europe after electronically nerfing cars [0] despite shipping the cars with hardware fully capable.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrive.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;41678&#x2F;full-rear-wheel-steering-on-mercedes-eqs-will-be-575-annual-subscription-in-germany-report" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrive.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;41678&#x2F;full-rear-wheel-steering...</a>

BMW in particular, and german carmakers as a whole are in for a rough decade. Declining quality and increasing competition will pose the kind of risks not even eu protectionism can shield them from.<p>One such risk is china. German carmakers desperately need new markets and china is one of them. But germany and the eu cant bully china and they will want access to european markets in return. And what i am reading and hearing is that chinese ev carmakers are rather competitive.

This is the industry pushing to see what it can get away with. It does this with new things. There&#x27;s always a drive to increase alienation. It&#x27;s as natural as the wind.<p>It&#x27;s our job to be whiny assholes about it.

&gt; Rather, the luxury automaker wanted to streamline production and reduce costs there by physically installing heated seats in every single car, since 90% of all BMWs are bought with seat heaters anyway.<p>They could’ve just taken a page from Audi’s playbook and made heated seats standard. No subscription bs.

It&#x27;s not controversial, everyone thinks it&#x27;s ridiculous

What they really need to do is charge by the minute. No one wants to pay for heated seats in the summer. And why should someone pay for the option of heating when the car is parked? Or for the passenger seats when no one is using them. Instead they should have surge pricing for when the outside temperature falls below freezing, and the colder it gets, the higher the rate you pay. Maybe it starts at $0.10&#x2F;minute but climbs to $1&#x2F;min when it get down to -40 °C&#x2F;°F. What could be a better marker of high social status than that?

Probably a good idea, I pretty much eliminated them from the list of possibilities when shopping for a car this year because of this. I’m just one data point but I’m pretty sure im not the only lost sale.

People aren’t happy owning nothing.

The right way to sell subscriptions is for services that actually incur ongoing costs for the company. Charging a subscription for hardware and software already built into the car, and not dependent on any external servers or anything is just plain anti-consumer. There are plenty of services BMW can charge for that people will happily pay, like remote start, remote monitoring etc.

Imagine a car manufacturer sold a car which was just a normal car. It didn&#x27;t spy on you, it didn&#x27;t rely on subscription for built in functionality, if you wanted something non-standard (say parking cameras or fancy paint color whatever) you paid for them upfront for a one off $x fee.<p>Chances are nobody would care, but just buy what peer pressure tells them to buy.

Is it illegal to enable the seat heating yourself after purchasing the car without the seat heating plan? Is it even possible?

I think Tesla also had heated rear seats in the Model 3 as a software unlock, then they went nah just make it standard?<p>They still have eg footwell lights that are physically there, but not available for activation in the RWD version (LR and P only). They might just flash on during a software upgrade, never to be seen again!<p>It makes sense that automakers want to segment features at the lowest possible cost, but the acceptance of something as basic as seat warmers being a subscription service on a premium car is probably lower than for advanced autopilot stuff.

&gt; which was actually not true, but perception is reality<p>This is beyond stupid.

Now you will have to pay for the app that turns them off.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230907191052&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;alistaircharlton&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;bmw-drops-controversial-heated-seats-subscription-to-refocus-on-software-services&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230907191052&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes...</a>

&gt; <i>&quot;Going forward, BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, ... which is completely understandable.&quot;</i><p>Is it completely understandable though? Maybe I&#x27;m an old man shouting at clouds, but I remember when the concept of a software subscription was itself seen as an unseemly money-grab.

I wouldn&#x27;t mind this, as long as BMW compensates me for the extra pounds of gear they installed. Fuel ain&#x27;t cheap.

Oh that&#x27;s too bad, as a consumer, I would have loved to have been obligated to pay for that feature in perpetuity.

Awesome! Now do Chamberlain MyQ who want you to charge you to open your own garage door!

Give up on that stupid wheel knob please. No one likes that thing

I don&#x27;t understand the big deal, I look at the price and features and see if it makes sense for me. Nothing wrong with market segmentation. Some people want a fancy brand car as a checkbox but can only pay so much, for others a little extra is no big deal. The only way to find out who is who is offer different packages for different price, even if the differences are more economically controlled by software. Would anyone really prefer not being able to afford a luxury brand at all, or paying more than they are comfortable with? This way, wealthy consumers effectively subsidize hardware for less wealthy consumers.

Imagine you bought a new MacBook and it&#x27;s ⌘Command key doesn&#x27;t work until you sign-in online and pay a subscription.

Are there some hacking garages where you can enable features like these and disables features like GPS and telemetry?

It is funny since this is the company that did something similarly stupid with Apple CarPlay not that long ago.<p>BMW has really lost their way.

I think it would be different if heated seats had never existed before now. The fact that they are relatively standard in modern cars of a certain price range, and there are many other manufacturers who don’t charge a subscription for them, made this feel like people were having something taken away from them.<p>I don’t know that heated seats is a hill I would personally die on, but I’m just glad that pushback is taking place so manufacturers get the message that there are limits to what they can gate behind a paywall.

A little sad that this is being pulled back - I was looking forward to after market hacks

Paywalled features really cheapen a brand. Nothing about a monthly subscription to activate existing services really screams &quot;premium&quot; to me.

Ok, now let’s get Smart TV manufacturers to stop collecting data.

How about you refocus on making cars mate.

Yeah, that was never going to work out.

turn signals are still paywalled