BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again

https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-is-charging-a-subscription-fee-for-heated-seats-again

by bitcharmer • 4 years ago

95 123 4 years ago

N19PEDL2• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Simply put - because they think they can get away with it.

atwood22• 4 years ago

It's a form a price discrimination.

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

Car 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• 4 years ago

But then why the monthly cost instead of a one-time cost for "unlocking" the feature?

spindle• 4 years ago

Thank you for this. It makes sense, and IMO price descrimination is fine in principle. But in this case it's just so obviously so annoying. I bet they're losing a lot more in brand loyalty than they're gaining in cash.

4gotunameagain2• 4 years ago

This is one of the things I found absurd when reading a bit about "business". If I am not mistaken this is called "cannibalising your own market" and I find the concept repulsive.

If you can sell a car with a heated steering wheel for the same price or even lower than one without, the only reason you would not do it is because you care about the profit and not the product you produce.

Lio4• 4 years ago

This sounds like stuff that hard bargaining customers to can get dealers to "throw in for free". A bit like "mats, flaps and a tank of fuel".

If you tell the salesman you're not going to buy the car unless they turn on all the features for free and it's the end of the sales month they probably will.

It's not like it's costing BMW anything, it's just classic rent seeking behaviour for them.

Only weak customers will pay for things like this twice (once in the purchase price and again in "feature" rent).

I could also see a thriving market for used cars that have been permanently unlocked to have "better specs" than new.

No secondhand car dealer worth his salt is going to put up with that bullshit when he could sell the car fully loaded for no extra cost.

twic• 4 years ago

This is exactly how IBM mainframes are priced (or were, for many years, not sure if it still works like this). A 12-CPU and 16-CPU machine are exactly the same, just with more cores enabled in the latter case. If you buy an upgrade from IBM, they don't send you a new machine, just send someone round to turn the other CPUs on.

kumarvvr4• 4 years ago

I don't understand the point

Money.

orangepanda• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

How would they detect if the car is sold?

orangepurple• 4 years ago

Cross referencing state registration databases. Sirius XM always finds your new address. The dealerships too.

PeterStuer• 4 years ago

Yep, we are on the darkest timeline. Enjoy the ride.

dusted2• 4 years ago

In 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• 4 years ago

how many blinks left and right

Not gonna be an issue for BMW drivers.

q-base3• 4 years ago

Hahaha brilliant!

mantas2• 4 years ago

Do you think your job is useless? At this very moment someone is installing blinkers in BMW factory...

thrwyoilarticle• 4 years ago

how many blinks left and right

In some cars tapping the indicator stalk will do a fixed number of blinks e.g. 3 versus old cars with a physical circuit that was completed when you hold it. For the new cars, you can change the number of blinks with OBD2. For a lot of people, their only access to it is via dealerships. So we're already there!

yoyopa• 4 years ago

what if instead of this idiocy they just thew in heated seats for free?

jimnotgym• 4 years ago

So 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• 4 years ago

What if I just hook it up manually?

verytrivial2• 4 years ago

My 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.

amelius2• 4 years ago

Rip out the controller and insert your own.

regularfry8• 4 years ago

Depends on the specifics, but it could also just be a pair of wires run from a central body controller. The current's not that high.

Markoff2• 4 years ago

I guess you void warranty. After warranty there is no reason why not to do it.

hardware2win• 4 years ago

"Heated Seats Hacking 101"

raxxorraxor2• 4 years ago

These 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.

kjhgkjghkj4• 4 years ago

Everyone 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.

raxxorraxor2• 4 years ago

It 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.

turbinerneiter• 4 years ago

These business ideas are very much US/SV ideas. Tesla started it in cars.

wewxjfq• 4 years ago

They turned something mundane into a subscription. To me it sounds like they can keep up with Silicon Valley innovation just fine.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Not that the cars still have significant quality, just the brand recognition is left.

This. Have plastics coming off of my bmw and porsche. Both premium german carmakes. Friends bmw has electronics going hay wire, faulty control boards, bluetooth needs resetting by turning the car on and off and so on. Also the amount of times there are recalls made in the us while in europe you have to pay for solving the same issue is ridiculous. BMWs are infamous for a timing chain issue where it can loosen and snap damaging the engine. Porsche had an axle carrier issue that was recalled in europe years after the us. Oh and dont get me started on their customer service quality.

All in all not buying german brands again. Used to be ok but not anymore. They turbine them to death and “improve” dashboards here and there but thats it. Boring old tech.

kjhgkjghkj4• 4 years ago

They are not designed to be owned.

regularfry8• 4 years ago

You're more right than you know. The big German brands are iterating towards having chunks of their build completely outsourced. The initial design and branding is centrally owned, but if you've bought in the last 10 years, you might well have a physical object actually assembled by Magna Steyr.

verytrivial2• 4 years ago

Why 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• 4 years ago

When 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• 4 years ago

Buy old/second hand

jsiaajdsdaa• 4 years ago

"After-market auto parts, restomods, and repair services don't exist-- the post"

kumarvvr4• 4 years ago

True, 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• 4 years ago

Or 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).

gnicholas• 4 years ago

For 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!

discopicante2• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

That’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.

kumarvvr4• 4 years ago

If 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• 4 years ago

In addition to the cost of the energy required to actually heat the seats.

blabberwocky• 4 years ago

I think the distinction is semantic. The customer is paying for a feature set and usable spec which he receives. It’s not as if the customer pays some price expecting to use the heated seats and doesn’t get to do so.

There’s an argument that this unnecessarily reduces everyone’s fuel efficiency due to the greater weight of the hardware, etc., but again this is more or less already captured in the advertised spec.

invalidusernam3• 4 years ago

The fact that the hardware needed for the heated seats is already there and you're paying to turn it on is the weird part. For BMW, the cost of the heated seats must be very low if they're prepared to install them in all cars without knowing if the consumer will pay for the them or now.

It's like buying a new laptop and paying to unlock additional RAM that is already installed, just not available. It would make me feel like the cost to the manufacturer is so low if they're prepared to risk it, that me paying for it after the fact feels like I'm getting ripped off (or that I've already actually payed for it in the original cost)

discopicante2• 4 years ago

Maybe that's the point – more consistency in the manufacturing line might actually reduce costs for BMW and/or allow them to ship more vehicles faster.

Perhaps the majority cost for the option is not for the equipment but for the labor involved in installing it.

kevin_thibedeau2• 4 years ago

IBM does this with their mainframes.

laumars3• 4 years ago

I don't disagree with your point but it's worth noting that this practice does actually happen in IT as well. For example some software licenses are tied to physical hardware (that was common with servers back in the day) so you'd often have to hardware disabled at the software level. AMD also sold a bunch of functioning 4 and 8 core CPUs with cores disabled when their 3 and 6 core CPUs were selling faster than AMD could meet demands. Albeit in that latter case it wasn't a subscription service to have them enabled. In fact with computing hardware, it's really common for the same hardware features to be supported across a range of models but only have specific features enabled in software (eg with graphics cards).

praptak• 4 years ago

Any physical device that you sold me I can use whenever and however I want. Offering this as a paid option is not enough.

dncornholio• 4 years ago

In any case, I see customer value

It costs BMW nothing to enable the heater. The heater is in your car and you cannot use it. Where is the added value for the customer exactly? If I don't want to use, you just don't turn it on. There is exactly 0 value for the customer here, and all the value to BMW.

frereubu• 4 years ago

Fair point. But my concern about the "permanent" purchase would still be similar to "buying" a move on Amazon Prime. There's presumably still a mechanism for this to be rescinded somehow, whether through technical error, sunsetting the API that's used etc.

regularfry8• 4 years ago

If you think about how much functionality on a modern car depends on the legislative region it's sold in (which turns out to be quite a lot), the same is true for an awful lot of functionality in a modern car. Flip the wrong bit and you're not road-legal.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

This is really about siphoning away resale value.

xupybd• 4 years ago

See earlier discussion about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026

jiveturkey• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

That time you are stuck in rain and you didn't buy the windscreen wiper DLC

pacifika• 4 years ago

When the windscreen wiper DLC is more expensive when it rains.

rswail• 4 years ago

BMW 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• 4 years ago

It's April's fool's day right.

It is isn't it. Yeah it is.

Lio4• 4 years ago

A 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• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Why 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• 4 years ago

He said "dealer". The dealer must be working with the official VW hardware/software, not some knock-off Chinese cable.

kelchm• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years ago

If 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• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

Clickbait title. Should be renamed.

erybodyknows• 4 years ago

Would something like this be locally jailbreak-able? Do newer vehicles require a phone-home verification of some sort to function?

Markoff2• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Does this mean if AWS is down your "bum" is cold?

BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again

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