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BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again
- verytrivial 4y agoWhy on Earth should I drive around carrying an inert device that's held to ransom? I would pivot on my heel and walk out of the showroom laughing if I was told this by a salesman.
- anoy8888 4y agoWhen every car is doing that in the future ( i blame Tesla for starting the trend ) , you will have no choice if you need a car
- nly 4y agoBuy old/second hand
- dazc 4y agoThen how do you impress impress random people that don't know you?
- drewzero1 4y agoBuy really old; then it's "classic".
- thih9 4y agoLikely also less safe.
- dazc 4y ago/anecdata I can't recall ever seeing a classic car involved in a road accident. Modern BMWs, on the other hand, quite the opposite.
- thih9 4y agoI meant safety as in airbags or crash test results, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TikJC0x65X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TikJC0x65X0 .
- drewzero1 4y agoDepends on whether you pay your airbag subscription on the new one.
- thih9 4y agoAre you sure? I'd guess new cars, subscription or not, are generally safer than "classic" cars; see video in my comment below [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070675
- drewzero1 4y agoThat is certainly a factor. Crumple zones do a lot to absorb forces of impact and prevent intrusion into the passenger compartment. See also: [0] We're getting to the point where a lot of cars that could be called "classic" still have the modern safety features without all of the connected bs. Most late 90s-early 2000s cars have multiple airbags, crumple zones, active seatbelts etc. without also needing to have subscriptions, telemetry, or really any connectedness at all. Granted, subscription-based safety features aren't the point here, but they're certainly a future possibility (as discussed here last year with a motorcycle safety accessory[1]). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27054629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27054629
- Lio 4y agoI definitely don't invite them into my car to demonstrate I'm paying extra rent for hardware I've already paid for, if that's what you're asking.
- Sebb767 4y agoWith the most annoying exhaust sound possible and subwoofers that shake the living rooms of the houses you drive by, obviously!
- slig 4y ago>no cars older than N years are allowed in the city >no non-electric cars are allowed etc
- jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago"After-market auto parts, restomods, and repair services don't exist-- the post"
- kumarvvr 4y agoTrue, until every manufacturer does it (like with headphone jacks on mobiles). In this case though, only laws and regulation can protect consumers from crass corporate greed.
- cm2187 4y agoOr commercials in TV menus. Competition should be the way out of those anti-consumer behaviours but these are very difficult markets to compete in (as Microsoft and Nokia found out for mobiles).
- N19PEDL2 4y agoI don't understand the point of charging people to use something that is already installed on the vehicle. I agree that advanced software that probably requires updates and improvements on a regular basis (e.g., autonomous driving) may have a monthly cost, but why pay for the mere use of things that are already on the car?
- noir_lord 4y agoSimply put - because they think they can get away with it.
- atwood22 4y agoIt's a form a price discrimination.
- SilverBirch 4y agoCar manufacturers are in an extremely tight business and a very important part of their business is supply chain. It's not so much about how much the materials cost to build a car, but the complexity of managing a complex supply chain. The result is that it's extremely important for them to minimize the number of different components they have. It's extremely common across the car industry for manufacturers to share as many components as possible across as many vehicles as possible. This is why it used to be extremely common for car center consoles to have lots of blanked out buttons, they wanted to keep the main part the same even if you didn't purchase the optional extras that needed the buttons. So if the heated steering wheel is only a little more expensive that the non-heated steering wheel then it's far better to just install the heated wheel on every car. At that point you might say well if it's on the car why not just include it in the price? Well that's just down to marketing strategy, they think they can make more money by charging extra to turn it on. At the end of the day they're there to make a profit margin and price discrimination is a fairly well understood sales strategy.
- moring 4y agoBut then why the monthly cost instead of a one-time cost for "unlocking" the feature?
- orangepanda 4y ago> But you can also pay for a year subscription, a three-year subscription, or you can buy the heated seats permanently. Non transferable when the car is sold, of course.
- vasachi 4y agoHow would they detect if the car is sold?
- orangepurple 4y agoCross referencing state registration databases. Sirius XM always finds your new address. The dealerships too.
- PeterStuer 4y agoYep, we are on the darkest timeline. Enjoy the ride.
- dusted 4y agoIn the end, they will be rentals.. First heated seats, then other features, then amount of miles, and, I hope, how many blinks left and right :)
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago>how many blinks left and right Not gonna be an issue for BMW drivers.
- q-base 4y agoHahaha brilliant!
- q-base 4y agoThere is an interesting connection between downvoting a comment praising an observation about caricaturical behavior and the personality said comment is meant to highlight.
- stavros 4y agoIt's just that comments that don't add much tend to get frowned upon here. There's generally a lack of "agreeing" comments, the upvote button is used for that.
- q-base 4y agoThat could be it. I just wanted to praise the parent as it was a very clever and funny comment, which to me deserved more than "just" an upvote. But thanks for pointing out.
- stavros 4y agoI think if you had said something like "I find this a very clever and funny comment, well done" it would have been better received, but I'm also just guessing.
- yoyopa 4y agowhat if instead of this idiocy they just thew in heated seats for free?
- jimnotgym 4y agoSo their car had more premium features than their competitors, for the same price, so giving them a market advantage. Everything was an optional extra on British cars, and then the Japanese ones came in and took market share easily with a free radio.
- ccvannorman 4y agoWhat if I just hook it up manually?
- verytrivial 4y agoMy guess would be the actual heating element controller will be a black box talking on some sort of bus that authenticates against the car's controller and maybe even the keyfob as is sometimes the case for mileage. So you might be able to turn it on, but only to like 100% and never get it to be controllable by the dash or voice or whatever.
- amelius 4y agoRip out the controller and insert your own.
- lozenge 4y agoAnything on the ODB communications bus can be picked up by other systems. Maybe they'll claim you've invalidated your warranty.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe ODB port only has to provide emissions diagnostics. Anything else can be isolated.
- regularfry 4y agoThe OBD port only has to provide emissions diagnostics to you. The machine the dealer plugs into it is a different barrel of bananas.
- amelius 4y agoI mean, rip out the cable that goes into the seat, and attach your own controller.
- 4y ago
- hardware2win 4y ago"Heated Seats Hacking 101"
- raxxorraxor 4y agoThese are typical German mud hut business decisions and indicative why the digital sphere is an insurmountable barrier for German tech. Not that the cars still have significant quality, just the brand recognition is left. That said, the premium illusion is part of the deal for people buying the cars, perhaps this will help with that at least.
- kjhgkjghkj 4y agoEveryone already rents their flashy, new German car. Now they're going to have to pay even more for "premium" features. Why do you think this is indicative of a failing business? Judging by the sheer number of almost-new German cars I see in all areas of town, those of us who won't touch them are a small minority.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoIt is not failing, they sill have their revenue. BMW are decent cars that focus on driver comfort a lot. But tech and quality is just average and you pay for brand. They have a bit of innovation aside from switching to electric. For example you can also buy a function to play motor sounds on the inside for around 135€/$... Hey, at least it is a one time purchase. Yay! The name recognition will go a long way on international markets. Will probably take years until people notice that they buy average crap. As far as I know they introduced this in Korea. Perhaps people have other expectations there.
- kjhgkjghkj 4y ago>people notice that they buy average crap Don't be silly, no-one actually buys their shiny box stuffed full of unmaintainable toys any more! Saying that, I am very curious to see how this affects the car financing and second hand market over the next few years. At some point, these baubles have to be offloaded from the lease market and bought by somebody.
- wewxjfq 4y agoThey turned something mundane into a subscription. To me it sounds like they can keep up with Silicon Valley innovation just fine.
- gnicholas 4y agoFor those who didn’t read the article first (like me), this is only in Korea. Still not great, but not as bad as I’d assumed, given it’s in thedrive.com, which I think of as US-centric. Hopefully this won’t make its way out of Korea!
- discopicante 4y agoI am wondering how many commenters actually read the (clickbait) article; BMW offers the option to purchase the feature permanently. The subscription is optional. In any case, I see customer value in the optionality for this specific case. Perhaps the biggest reason for not purchasing heated seats is that customers have never used them in the past. Perhaps customers would otherwise not want to commit up-front for a feature they think they don't need or will only use 3-5 months out of the year.
- headsoup 4y agoThis seems to imply that there would be some significant cost to BMW for implementing it, which is clearly not the case if it can be enabled on subscription. Otherwise just make headlights an optional subscription too because they're only used occasionally...
- vr46 4y agoThat’s not the only perspective. Suppose everybody started building devices and vehicles packed with hardware that the user might never access or use? What happens to the device when it’s decommissioned? Is the breaker’s yard allowed to strip and part out the subscription-only hardware? Why should a thousand customers burn fuel pointlessly to haul round features they don’t use? Who owns the actual hardware in the event of not-subscribing? Suppose the unwanted hardware causes failures or interference elsewhere? It’s one thing to toggle feature flags, but I doubt the seats are heated by overclocking an Intel i9 on bootup.
- kumarvvr 4y agoIf the option can be enabled in the future, doesn't that mean the car is having the hardware in the seats? (Heating coils, or what have you). Then, wouldn't that mean the customer is already paying for the hardware (cost of the car itself), and everything else is just greed?
- rkachowski 4y agoIn addition to the cost of the energy required to actually heat the seats.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThis is really about siphoning away resale value.
- xupybd 4y agoSee earlier discussion about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026
- jiveturkey 4y agoThis has been going on for ages in hardware. Anything reasonably sophisticated in silicon has features that are there, and just need to be enabled. With cash. It makes perfect sense, once you get over it. Do you know that in some cars, the driver's seat comes heated, and for the passenger seat to be heated is an additional cost option? Power seats sometimes have the same optionality. Not quite the same as renting the feature, but similar market strategy. Some cars make you rent the Apple Airplay feature. Some BMWs (maybe all) have traffic info tied to XM radio. After your trial subscription to XM ends, so does traffic info. It's exactly SAML as an enterprise tier only feature.
- HissingMachine 4y agoThat time you are stuck in rain and you didn't buy the windscreen wiper DLC
- pacifika 4y agoWhen the windscreen wiper DLC is more expensive when it rains.
- rswail 4y agoBMW have always "nickel and dimed" purchasers on options. They're just extending that into the post-sale relationship. Cars are becoming part of a "mobility as a service", and like telcos and phones (in the non-US market), the cost of an individual call/sms becomes irrelevant. Many people already lease and/or have personal loans to "buy" vehicles, so they don't own the vehicle completely until the loan is paid off. People associate all of this with EVs, but essentially, the business model of cars has moved to ways of extracting ongoing revenue from consumers, given that the previous extraction via servicing and parts is starting to disappear as hardware becomes more resilient to failure and as EVs remove large elements that were previously failure points requiring repair or servicing.
- pleb_nz 4y agoIt's April's fool's day right. It is isn't it. Yeah it is.
- Lio 4y agoA friend of mine just told me what he went through to fit rear speakers in his VW van. Same sort of thing as this BMW bullshit. His head unit had the hardware to run rear speakers but it hadn't been enabled by the dealer. To turn it on he had to buy a "special" VW coms cable as the dealer's own cable had "worn out". That cable is only good for a certain number vehicle upgrades. There's nothing in the cable that degrades but VW have worked out they can use it to charge extra rent for anyone that wants to add speakers to a van they've already purchased. What I take from that little story is that when my current Golf finally gives out I won't be buying another VW. Once you know that a manufacturer is doing this, you can be pretty sure they'll be no ends to the steps they'll go to rip you off. Parts that just stop working for no good reason, that sort of thing. It's inkjet printers all over again.
- cr3ative 4y agoI think you might be confusing manufacturers for the cable here - a lot of VCDS-type cable companies (or OBDII bluetooth etc) will charge per-operation for feature unlocks. That's not VW though - that's the companies selling this coding operation.
- NavinF 4y agoWhy would VW lock the feature if they’re not making any money from unlocking it? Aren’t the companies that make these devices undercutting VW by unlocking features for less than what VW charges?
- pakitan 4y agoHe said "dealer". The dealer must be working with the official VW hardware/software, not some knock-off Chinese cable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kelchm 4y agoThe feature isn’t “locked” — it’s just a configuration option on one of the control modules in the car based on the original build configuration. Keep in mind that a specific module might be used on many different models of car. Why not just have the rear speaker outputs enabled at all times even on vehicles that do t have rear speakers? I suspect it’s as simple as VW not wanting to show the front/rear fader control for a vehicle where it isn’t applicable. FWIW, this absolutely can be done yourself using VCDS or OBD 11 to update the module settings. I suspect in this case the dealer wasn’t telling you the entire truth — it may be as simple as them not having an established procedure for this in house and wanting to just get you to go away.
- yalogin 4y agoIf I may rephrase it a little less damaging to BMW- they decided to make all cars with heated seats. But if someone didn’t want to buy that functionality they had a software method to enable or disable it. Since the feature is already there they gave their dealers a way to upsell it to the consumers. It’s just bad experience all around, particularly for an expensive car like bmw. I can understand if a penny pinching car company does it, but bmw should have just gone ahead and made heated seats default in all their cars, much classier and would have generated a lot of good will.
- prepend 4y agoThis sounds even worse for BMW. Including heated seats hardware for all cars increases the cost for all cars. So even if an owner doesn’t pay for heated seats, their price is still increased because the equipment is there. Perhaps this cost is very low, but that just reminds me that these options are extremely overpriced and a bit of a rip off.
- k5hp 4y agoClickbait title. Should be renamed.
- erybodyknows 4y agoWould something like this be locally jailbreak-able? Do newer vehicles require a phone-home verification of some sort to function?
- Markoff 4y agoI mean does any normal sane person without mental issues/complex buy BMW car outside Europe? Because here in Europe it's exemption to see normal person owning this brand, only competition being still way behind is Audi. I taught my kids to be extra careful when they see BMW car, that's like huge red flag when you see it on the road. Told them they are assigning these cars to bad drivers. You can find them in other brands as well, but with BMW it's guaranteed.
- belter 4y agoDoes this mean if AWS is down your "bum" is cold?