BMW is going to a subscription service model for features: Article
Seems scammy to make people pay for features the car is built with to me.
BMW is going to a subscription service model for features: Article
Seems scammy to make people pay for features the car is built with to me.
People in this generation are used to subscription services. However, with the massive\ failure Caddy had with theirs, be interesting to see how this works.
If I bought one (I won't), this would be helpful for me. My cars have seat heaters, I never use them. When I travel to Montana/Alaska/Seattle, I can pay for the service, use the seat heater for a few weeks. Come home, turn it off, and lower my cost. Sounds like a win for me, on not having to pay for so much of the things in our cars, we never use.
berkeley BMW
This reminds me of that used Tesla that was sold with some of the features that the original owner paid for disabled. My first impression is "if the car has it, I should be able to use it", but as software becomes an ever-more-important part of cars, that way of thinking may gradually be phased out.
This industry is currently undergoing it's biggest change since... I don't know when. Maybe in the 70s when foreign competition started to threaten the Big 3?
I'm all for it. Buy the cheap version, use some russian software to flash the options, party on!
ummm seat heaters need BMWs help ????? what would need to be monitored or upgraded ?
I can see "maybe" charging for GPS maps and upgrades after 5 years ,
What happens if you do not pay ? Does your crusise control go down to 2G speed !
mr2s2000elise said:People in this generation are used to subscription services. However, with the massive\ failure Caddy had with theirs, be interesting to see how this works.
If I bought one (I won't), this would be helpful for me. My cars have seat heaters, I never use them. When I travel to Montana/Alaska/Seattle, I can pay for the service, use the seat heater for a few weeks. Come home, turn it off, and lower my cost. Sounds like a win for me, on not having to pay for so much of the things in our cars, we never use.
But we aren't. We pay monthly to get access, not to use features. For example we don't pay monthly to use the camera or microphones to call on our phones, but we do pay to get access to data/calling.
BMWs plan is super ignorant. Too many high level decision makers listening to software people. These are the same people who SWORE we'd have full autonomous cars mainstream by now, or that having override ability vs the dumb pilots with only single redundancy in the 777max is a good idea...yet here we are. They are dreamers, and should not be decision makers, yet too many have the ear of those who do.
ztnedman1 said:
For example we don't pay monthly to use the camera or microphones to call on our phones, but we do pay to get access to data/calling.
Dude! Shut up! Don't give them any ideas!
Yeah, that's a no from me dawg.
No car maker really makes cars for us peoples anymore. They have moved on.
There's stuff where subscription models make sense. There's stuff where it doesn't.
Putting features physically in the copy of the software you install doesn't cost anything significant, so determining what to build and maintain based on who wants to pay to actually use it makes sense. It can be present and turned off and that's fine, because the folks who don't use the feature don't incur a cost to ship it to them.
Putting seat heaters physically into a car and having the folks who do subscribe pay enough to make it profitable while incurring the cost of adding extra parts to a car is asinine. I recognize that the cost of the physical parts may be small and the savings on not having more than one seat SKU is something, but if it's that cheap to add them, then incurring the cost of administrating a seat heater subscription system is a waste of money. Just list it as a feature and bake it into the price. If it's so cheap to not charge the folks who don't want it, go ahead and let it wash out in regional price variation (i.e. the dealer in Florida won't be able to use it as much as a feature as the dealer in Michigan, but make it up on cold-state price, not subscription.)
Which is not to say that it can't be profitable, just that, IMHO, it's wrong. I think there are business folks who just can't contain themselves when faced with the idea that any given concept can be turned from a single sale to an ongoing payment. And after working QA in a field that had DRM, I just see red anytime I'm faced with an example of where a failure to authorize with a server somewhere results in the inability to access content someone has paid for (e.g. a game company goes under, the servers get shut off, and a game which was purchased outright and that had a local-single-player mode just refuses to work without the servers). If BMW turns off seatheaters.bmw.com, what happens to the seat heaters? Lack of parts for older models is one thing, having their servers turned off shouldn't be a way for them to break.
It is genuinely (and oddly) disconcerting to me to feel so disconnected from BMW. I started building my first 2002 in... 1992? I imprinted on the feel of those cars, loved my E28 (EDIT: and my E30!), and currently daily a 2016 Mini. I still like many aspects of their cars, but some combination of the modern car market and BMW's specific choices within it just make me feel like I'm dealing with an ex who seems like a stranger now. Even the Roundel seems to harbor a fair few contributors whose feeling seems to be "well, I'm still a fan of several decades' worth of their cars; it's no different than being a fan of MG or Norton or some other thing whose modern company either doesn't exist or isn't really related to the folks who built the interesting vehicles."
Why don't they just concentrate on making the cars more reliable after the warranty runs out!
In reply to Jesse Ransom :
I can tell you, sadly, what would happen. The BMW seat heater website would go down, and they would simply turn on everybody's seat heaters for free. Which would royally pissed off all the people that were just paying for it for all those years.
this is why no one should buy video game DLC. The devs would have to put it in the game from day one and we gamers wouldn't have this terrible situation where you pay for the dlc and six months later it's free to everyone, once the game has lost its "steam" (pun intended steam!)
They aren't going to make any money on the turn signals.
(I can't believe no one went there)
Cooter said:They aren't going to make any money on the turn signals.
(I can't believe no one went there)
They already do. Ever notice how man high end cars have burned out turn bulbs? Like, less than a year old. And guess what isn't covered by the warranty? Yeah, bulbs.
rustybugkiller said:Why don't they just concentrate on making the cars more reliable after the warranty runs out!
Because then why would you trade it in for a new one?
Can't you just pay a hacker to bypass the system and allow you to access the features for free? I see a whole new business model here.
Lower resale value and higher total cost of ownership...What's not to like?
I might be willing to consider it if I could pay to have the 3rd pedal and H gated manual 'turned on'.
IF you pay for a service, you are paying for the function not the item. Which means BMW would somehow have to compensate you if the seat heater broke and you were not able to heat your bum in July as you paid for. At least that's the way computers-as-a-service works, you are paying for up time.
Or maybe the cars monitor how long you use the feature and then charge you at the end of the month based on total hours. Like it costs $0.10 per minute to use the seat heaters but only $0.01 every time the blinker flashes.
Just another money stream for BMW and other companies. They realize that once an app or whatever they want to call it is turned on the average consumer will continue to pay rather then take the time/inconvenience to have it turned off. What's next will you purchase a car with a set amount of mileage and when the mileage is exceeded you will have to pay for additional mileage to get it turned back on. Life and things change sometime not for the better.
I hope this fails and people get fired and lose their jobs.
I can berkeleying wire in seat heaters myself.
I don't personally like the idea of "ongoing subscription", but once you move to a certain business/technology model, there are necessities related to software and keeping it up to date. If the software is a static, doesn't interact with anything, does not need to be kept up to date, then you don't have these issues. A big portion of BMW's revenue is through leases, which are essentially a car as a service ie. the same thing.
As a point of comparison, look at how Microsoft Office 365 displaced the one time purchase version. Businesses seem to love the new model. There is value in the new model too, look at how seamlessly most businesses handled keeping their employees home in the pandemic. A lot of stogy companies that couldn't have done it in a timely manner without this model.
For other manufacturers/situations: I have no issue with manufacturers enabling features through a one time cost. It might reduced overall production costs. Depending on how a manufacturer decided to implement this kind of program (ie. not what they're talking about in the link), it could be great for the used market. Imagine you buy a base model and want to upgrade a feature or two. Parts typically do not become cheaper as things go on. A manufacturer could decide that people who own a $50k car which has depreciated to $5k, might not be willing to pay the same price for a given feature. They could price it accordingly.
pirate said:What's next will you purchase a car with a set amount of mileage and when the mileage is exceeded you will have to pay for additional mileage to get it turned back on.
Yeah, but they'll probably just let you rack up the miles without reminding you about how much it's costing you, and force you to pay a lump sum at the end...Oh wait...That's just a lease.
I don't like this at all.
The hardware is there. This doesn't cost ANYTHING to turn it on. It is just plain greed.
How has this worked out for John Deere? (Not rehtorical, I'm legitimately asking)
I can't be the only one who read this headline and thought, "Hmmm, what would the BMW's second or third owner pay to unlock these features permanently?" 
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