BMW introduces new heated seat subscription in UK
bbc.com
bbc.com
- “BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026
- “BMW Makes Heated Seats an $18/Month Subscription Service – Again” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066565
They’re not giving you the heating hardware for free.
They’re selling you the heated seats and then selling you the ability to turn them on separately.
Not to mention the arbitrage opportunities. BMW are now the only car dealer network that can trade cars back without features and then add them in for no cost before they go back out on sale.
...or turn them off and get used car buyer to pay for them yet again.
Rent seeking MBA fuckers.
The only hope is that the market punishes them. The problem is that if every company does this then they act as a cartel and stop the market working correctly.
T-shirt slogan.
It should be illegal. This is all just a new workaround to consumer protections by way of EULAs, if I buy the hardware there should be a lawful way for me to use it. If a product is pure software, fine, but if it's hardware I bought and it won't work without some specific software the manufacturer should enable me to use it with my own software.
OK, I'll bite. Why? This is a free transaction between two parties, why should it be banned?
(There are several possible answers, I'm just interested which one motivates your comment.)
You also get economies of scale that lead to capital concentration, razor thin margins and extreme efficiency reliant on capital intensive business models. As a result you wind up with massive barriers to entry for new competitors, and so the usual "someone will come along and outcompete" doesn't really work. It works when you're selling doodads and fruit, but semiconductors and car manufacturing aren't fruit.
In particular, industries that become foundational to the workings of a society become impossible to avoid engaging in. In the US, cars are a given, you have to have a car. One car company does something and gets away with it with their customers, so the rest follow suit and now you're in an environment where everyone does it and there's no way out. There's no direct collusion here, just neither has an interest in competing on a front because the the practice benefits them both.
This is where industry regulation comes in. It comes in only when it isn't an entirely free transaction between two parties. Where a party must use a product or service, or where competitors collude directly or indirectly, state action is warranted. Examples where the party must use a product would be cars, food and car insurance. Direct collusion is interactive, indirect is passive, such as an entire industry without direct cooperation engaging in practices like this.
In Italy, prices started going down for mobile only when, back in 2007, they introduced a law to make unlawful minimum duration of contracts.
After that, given users could switch each month, prices went really down 'cause there was a _real_ market.
Here in Germany, you are locked to an operator for 24 months, and prices are crazy high. So, yes, please, more regulations.
Also, the claim that the car market is uncompetitive is not so easy to make. The top 5 players have about half of the market.[1] This is less concentrated than (say) the market for breakfast cereal. The market is quite global. Artificial barriers to entry have not stopped numerous recent entrants. It might even be that new pricing strategies like selling services will allow more entrants to the market - Tesla being the obvious example.
[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-microeconomics/chapte... - probably not the best source but ok for a quickie.
I mean a gunman robbing you on a side of the road is a free transaction between two free parties. Gunman is free to shoot you, and you are free to run away or take the bullet.
Free transaction between peers is what is actually useful considering.
First, there is a huge asymmetry in the relationship between a consumer and such a large entity as a car maker.
Second, you can’t vote with your feet much, as the market is controlled by a very limited number players who can easily collude to manipulate the market without explicitly doing so.
Third, many if not all car manufacturers receive subsidies from the government in various forms. Tesla as an example, selling regulatory credits plus consumer tax credit and rebates. If it is subsidized by tax payers, then why not attach strings to it prohibiting anti consumer behavior.
Well said. There are a handful of entities which control all the major car brands. It's the illusion of choice.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-advice/car-manufacturer-bran...
You buy a fan for $20. It works. It has a low, medium, and high setting.
One of the most influential fan makers decides they want to make a new product. It’s fan 2.0. It’s $21 dollars and has a $1 a month fee to unlock high speed. The package says “optional settings for a monthly fee. Buy only what you need and save.”
Other fan makers realize this is a great way to make money. 2 years later, all fans have this option.
Influential fan corp puts a press release for their revolutionary new product that’ll change the world. Fan 3.0. Medium speed is $3 a month.
Second reason: even if it were, 'free transaction' is not a measure of good. We ban carcinogens in food, lawn darts, and all sorts of other things because sometimes collective decisions for the common good are better for people than allowing society to be atomised and taken advantage of. This is the entire premise behind laws in the first place.
Thirdly, if there are ongoing conditions for the use of something after it is sold, laws preventing certain modifications by the buyer, and/or secrets required for its ongoing use/editing of software that are not cha7ngeable or knowable by the buywr, then the product was not 'sold' and representing the $50k paid as anything other than rent is, in any sane society, fraud.
I don't know where to draw the line. I hated that Tesla has a (pay $2k for a software upgrade for acceleration). Imagine it will escalate. Pay $1k to get your air-conditioner to 60f otherwise it stops at 68f. Pay $3k to turn 15 degrees sharper. Pay $1.5k for your defrosters to work twice as fast.
On the other hand, my phones, computers, and game machines, all came with no software and I pay for apps and Apple in particular has made it popular to pay for individual features inside an app. Download a photo editing app and it will be $2 for the blur feature, $2 for the tilt-shift feature, or $10 for all features... though now it's escalated to $XX per year on most iOS apps that have top end features.
I don't know how to feel about it. I used to pay ~$50 a year for photoshop (upgrading every other version for $200). Now I pay $120 a year. I mean, I like the idea of paying once but the truth is, for software I actually used, I'd pay for upgrades, even if only to get the software working on the latest OS version.
Are they? I mean, the GPU might be the same, and it might run with Quadro drivers, but the board might be different (cooling, power management, etc)
They had paid range upgrade in 2016: https://electrek.co/2016/11/08/tesla-in-car-purchase-softwar...
Yet it seems the market gave Tesla a pass?
It was not an unreasonable value proposition for the end user, but most importantly it was a single one-off payment. It's the monthly cost which really annoys me in the BMW case. Literally rent seeking. There is no justification whatsoever for a monthly fee for a heated seat, there is no back-end to run and maintain (other than what they build explicitly to make the rent a possibility, and fuck that).
It was a popular mod to retrofit the appropriate button (the wires were still there) and to have someone with access to Peugeot Planet activate the driving computer feature.
I, for one, welcome this change. BMW makes retrofit kits for everything because they know people want features that aren't in their spec and they're very expensive. I buy old, second hand cars and I'm at the mercy of the original buyer when it comes to features included. This way, not only do I get the option of a feature that was never bought, but I can enable it only for the couple of months I'd actually need it. Or better yet, I'll do what I do with everything I own and hack it, unlocking everything I can.
BMW are fantastic with parts and supporting older car maintenance. Even now I can order 20 year old parts (including electronic modules) new from BMW.
The problem comes when the manufacturer starts demanding legal "protection" against people hacking their own possessions, or sharing technical information about their possessions.
BMW have bundled features you can't access for a long term, and modders have been enabling them for a long time. Just look up the 328i to 330i tuning software for an example, you can use free software (bimmerlabs.com) to derestrict your engine to same power as the next model (it's the same engine, just restricted).
Spot on.
There should be absolutely no penalty for circumventing whatever DRM is causing these BMWs to be broken.
As I see this, you are buying two pieces of stuff - the physical car and a software subscription service. Maybe we need to split the two out? Like on PCs you can install any OS you want.
Only on some hardware and only some of the time depending on whether you consider Macs and arm based devices PC's.
That we can even do that is a historical accident.
If they are, your design is braindead and unsafe.
If they are properly separated, modifying heated seats is a non-issue.
I can sure as hell guarantee they didn't charge them the same amount as regular seats with the hope of you buying their subscription. The software effort is likely next to none, if any.
What makes it even funnier is that the one-time payment for a steering wheel is 200 pounds, which is roughly what you would pay for it as additional equipment, if not less. Why funking around with the customer?
If we transfer that to cars, then the subscription should also cover maintenance/repairs of the physical parts - in this case the heated seats. But I am pretty sure it does not.
As long buying them once and for all exists, it's just a new option.
It might be cheaper for BMW to install these features to every car than manufacture different cars with different options.
Even for a buyer who don't want to rent, ability to buy features later is nice option.
Products are rarely targeted to whole population. They are marketed to segments.
BMW cares only about what their customers think. They don't care about you and they know their average customer.
Pretty soon the weight of those things will actually impact fuel efficiency in a meaningful way. Otherwise why not just drive a tractor trailer around?
This is a cheap, weightless feature that is regularly retrofitted. Don't like the concept? Buy the heated seats outright when you spec the car, it'll get coded into your VO and you'll be able to use that feature right up until we run out of petrol.
I don't see the false equivalency however. Heated seats are technically an extra physical item just like many other features of the car. Some people don't need them, nor air conditioners, nor radios.
Some people may just want a frame, engine and body.
It seems the manufacturer, in this case, has simply chosen to ignore the wishes of those consumers. After all, BMW is known to be a luxury car brand and usually won't target value conscious consumers.
Reminds me of Lee Iacocca's funny, paradoxical quote... "People want economy and they will pay any price to get it". Including fooling themselves into thinking heating elements weigh nothing. Marketing departments will run with this and spin anything they can into extra profit; good on them!
If you want, be my guest and buy the option to rent heated seats from BMW :-)
Blink once again and they will be at your neck
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/no-bmw-is-not-making-he...
Automakers already tune the exact same engine to different power depending on trim level and that is also routinely worked around.
I think the same principle could be applied here. Heated seats that can't be used are causing increased emissions as the car needs to move them around without actually providing any benefit to the owner, and so should be regulated.
(Half kidding, half serious. If they are really that harmful, maybe a ban wouldn't be the craziest idea)
While it was possible to program the engine ECU to limit the power (and therefore speed), the operator deemed it legally safer and potentially less expensive to have the engines swapped with smaller ones, and store the original engines in one of the site warehouses.
Paying a subscription for a feature that doesn't require any effort om the BMW side (e.g. not the continuously updated infotainment system) is what makes this different.
4th line in the article, this particular service is indeed purchasable for a one time fee.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065026 2d ago, 377 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32066565 2d ago, 122 comments
(Not to diminish your link, but maybe the other discussions are interesting for those interested in the topic)
On the one hand, I would have liked the option to turn those features on.
On the other hand, once you factor in how much all those extras cost, BMW would lose on price.
I guess they've always relied on people who are willing to pay more for a BMW. But now they can sell a base model for a price similar to other manufacturers, and win customers who value the BMW brand over features, then charge for upgrades later.
Heated seats are harder to compete with. Still, I don't see this working out in the long run. £15 for heated seats, £10 for the steering wheel? I get that a BMW is an expensive car, £25 per month, for something you might use for at most half the year? I haven't even paid to get the heating fix in my six year old Renault after it broke four years ago, I rarely used it anyway.
The problem is that they'll have to take something away that I actually care about. That could be power steering, gears, headlight or breaks. If they do that, they get into issues with safety and will get regulated even hard. There's no point to this subscription nonsense, drop it.
* BMW charges everyone for the heater, but don't enable it.
* BMW lose money on the installation of the heaters, and overcharge subscribers. The subscribers need to cover the cost of the heaters in the remaining cars.
* A combination of the two, where everyone pay part of the heater, but the subscribers still have to pay some part the cost for non-subscribers.
There is no way around it though. Either BMW is scamming everyone or the subset of customers who are paying them the most.
If I opt for paying for the winter months only, the product is still overpriced. It has to be.
It's indefensible. You cannot launch this type of "service" and be the good guy.
It’s not like there is any additional service burden on their end that justifies renting it. It’s obviously disgusting, rent seeking practice. But we’re used to manufacturers selling artificially limited products due to economies of scale… and can probably even tolerate it.
But _renting_ you the damn extra? Will intel now rent me an extra few hundred peak mhz too?
I'm _certain_ this is on an internal roadmap for fairly soon
With this new thing i guess, he'll become a billionaire.
I wonder what that will do long term for the perception of the brand.
"Yeah it's a decent looking car, how much is the rent per month?"
What if BMW announced they will perpetually donate all of the proceeds to some real charity organizations?
Would we still be opposed to this subscription?
We should have the right to decide what charities we support with our money, and not have that freedom taken away from us.