BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise just make headlights an optional subscription too because they're only used occasionally...
It’s one thing to toggle feature flags, but I doubt the seats are heated by overclocking an Intel i9 on bootup.
Then, wouldn't that mean the customer is already paying for the hardware (cost of the car itself), and everything else is just greed?
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.
But not the Bill of Materials, upon which the price is ultimately decided.
What I mean to say is that a customer who chooses a spec that does not include heated seats, is supplied and charged for hardware that is not required in the spec.
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)
Perhaps the majority cost for the option is not for the equipment but for the labor involved in installing it.
Yes, it's a horrible idea.
Cashing in on Excel users is what Intel marketing was betting on. Only it wasn't just Excel users using the FPU: One of the things that killed this plan was the upswing in 3-D games that used floating point math (in other words, Quake).
I'm not sure what BMW are thinking with the seat heaters. I suspect someone thinks they can make a saving by reducing variation in seat construction and that saving offsets the additional material costs. All the software/subscription/after-market nonsense flows from that, but the fundamental design driver is, I would bet, manufacturing complexity.
I think that recurring monthly revenue is also highly appreciated, especially considering how other industries (game, movie) are moving in spite of manufacturing complexity.
One of them. If it was only about manufacturing, they could just as easily make heated seats standard on all bmws.
I think a big motivator would also be the ability for owners to opt in at a later date. In most cars you only have the chance to offer an upgrade at the time of purchase. Making it a software thing means that I can add it on 6 months after buying the car. Or the second owner can add it on.
The reason AMD did this was because they had the genius idea of selling off some faulty CPUs at a cheaper price but with the faulty core disabled. However those cheaper CPUs sold so well that AMD ended up having to disable working cores on non-faulty units to meet demand.
Since you could actually unlock those cores, lots more people started to buy 3 and 6 core CPUs in the hope that “CPU roulette” might pay off and they’d end up with a stable 4 or 8 core computer for the cost of a 3 or 6 core one.
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.
Non transferable when the car is sold, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In all honesty i did replace my porsche’s window switch myself by following enthusiast youtube tutorials. Buttons were falling off, naturally. Plenty of videos about the issue on 911s and 981s. Connector was like a regular pc connector and the panel came off easily. The bmw has issues with the rear controller. Will fix that myself as well since the “professional” didn't “detect” an issue.
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 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27054629
>no non-electric cars are allowed
etc
In this case though, only laws and regulation can protect consumers from crass corporate greed.
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).
Not gonna be an issue for BMW drivers.
Like a Teutonic Sisyphus, his work never done, never used...
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!
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.
>Heated seats, for instance, cost ₩24,000 (roughly $18) per month. But you can also pay for a year subscription ($176), a three-year subscription ($283), or you can buy the heated seats permanently ($406).
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.
Afaik, car manufacturing is a pretty low-margin business, about only 5-7% profit. If you sold a car at <1%, you wouldn't make it due to competition and occasional risk. But if your high-paying customer can raise your profits to 20%+, effectively subsidizing low-paying customers, then you'd average at 5-7%.
PS: low margin business is not a bad sign, in open and effective market any business must be low margin.
"Product versioning"[2][11] or simply "versioning" (or second-degree price differentiation) — offering a product line[9] by creating slightly different products for the purpose of price differentiation,[2][11] i.e. a vertical product line.[12] Another name given to versioning is "menu pricing".[10][13]
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.
Money.
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.
Perhaps this cost is very low, but that just reminds me that these options are extremely overpriced and a bit of a rip off.
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.
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.
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.
Everything was an optional extra on British cars, and then the Japanese ones came in and took market share easily with a free radio.
It is isn't it. Yeah it is.