Great way to tank a brand. Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it, but having your car force ads on you is something people wouldn't even expect from a Kia Soul leased off a used lot.
Between this, the proprietary nut patent, and the heated seat subscription, I'm probably not going to look at BMW for my next car. They've been going back on things, but all of this adds up to they don't get it.
Pushing advertisment after sale on a premium product is absolutely not similar.
‘Enjoy your “luxury“ car’, the kind of “luxury“ that appeals to subsidized e-reader buyers and discount airline customers.
And I like that. If BMW can’t resist monetizing their customers’ attention, they don’t deserve the higher-end customers their marketing suggests they desire.
Also I think everyone in our social circles have flagship phones but $50 Android pre-paids sell pretty well. (Someone probably knows, unlike me, the exact numbers.)
Praise be to AdBreak https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/AdBreak
I practically own it now!
Ryanair: can’t recall if they’re worse than Spirit/Frontier. “We have one price for tiny people flying with the shirt on their back, and other prices for everyone else like those who might need luggage, or, liquid to survive.“
Ryanair's whole shtick is "we'll treat you like cattle in a truck, and you'll be grateful you only paid €20 for the experience". I feel that anyone who is outraged by their nickel-and-diming doesn't really understand what Ryanair is about.
If I paid €200 for a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam, and they forced me to watch ads on the seatback screen and charged me to use the loo, then I'll be rightfully upset. But €50 for Ryanair? Where do I sign up for the €20 standing-only tickets?
I once flew from London Stansted (or maybe it was Luton?) to Dublin instead of from Heathrow with Aer Lingus to save a few bucks, and it never ended up saving me anything in the end.
With Aer Lingus the cheapest ticket includes 10kg of checked luggage, which is a nice middle ground between a tiny bag you can shove under your seat and a 23kg luggage
And Ryanair are not even cheaper most of the time unless you're prepared to fly at unsocialable times and forgo luggage.
Ryanair even seem to deliberately separate seats for adult passengers on the same booking so they can charge you extra to sit together...
The machine is a work of engineering art. It was made back in the days when BMW engineers were still given free rein to create The Ultimate Driving Machine. Remember that slogan? Back then, owning and driving a BMW was intentional. A driver's car. Design details down to things imperceptible were created with this intentional driver's desire to operate the vehicle. Sigh...
Now, it's apparently...The Ultimate Consumer Advertising Content Delivery System.
I feel sorry for the engineers that are still there from their glory days. Imagine being told from some power-suited punk to design that ad delivery mechanism.
BMWs are no where near for that "class". A Mercedes-Benz is for that and even they also put ads in their own dashboard screens. [0]
So on HN-land, time to rule out BMWs, Chevrolets, Mercedes-Benz, Teslas, Volkswagens, Kias. What else?
[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/797846/mercedes-screen-plays-ads...
Edit: Just read that Toyota is toying with the idea of an electric Starlet. It'll probably have an infotainment system and power "everything" though.
My current car had an electrical issue last year... but it turned out it was a mechanical issue. Something had chewed through the wires to the MAF sensor. Fixed them, and all good. It's no different from something chewing through a fuel line, except OBD was able to tell me what subsystem was not working correctly.
The problem I see with current cars is that the infotainment system is tied into everything - and usually the software sucks. If they just went back to seperate dashboard, AC controls and radio I'd have no issues with them.
My current car is from 2016, and I specifically looked for something that was like that. It is hybrid and has modern tech (e.g. radar cruise control), but everything is compartmentalised. First upgrade I did was replacing the headunit with a Chinese one that supports Android Auto/CarPlay. No functionality was lost, as the old head unit was literally just a radio and screen for backup camera.
Lucky for Big Brother they’ve blanketed this country (USA) in Flock cameras. New car, old car, they’re ready to pull over journalists in dealer loaners, people in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Not sure how common it is for Verizon, AT&T, Google (Maps), Apple (Maps) to sell to insurers (or brokers who insurers use). Perhaps pretty common? I’m sure they often can deanonymize it if they do.
Lexus should put that on the cover of their product brochure.
As long as they keep annoying ads and subscriptions out of their vehicles, I’ll keep driving them.
EDIT Add Volvo and Genesis to the list of no ads
Mercedes may have a car or two that reaches just out of upper middle class but they are largely a middle to upper middle class brand, just like BMW.
The fact that Merc would do it too just means they are both happy cheapening their brand to align with practices of cheap off-brand android TVs.
- The Settings: Apple Intelligence and Apple Fitness+ (including the red dot as if you missed something important).
- The app store. Typically 1/2 or 2/3 of the search page is covered by ads.
- Apple Wallet. They rolled out an F1 advertisement to Apple Wallet in some region.
- iWork apps now have advertisements for updating to an Apple Creator Studio subscription.
- Apple Maps will soon have ads.
Most restraint is gone now to grow the Services category. It just feels gross for flagship devices. It seems that AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS are the only road to sanity.
The S class sales are tanking as well as E class and the rest of their cars are just toyota corolla class with extra "luxury" features.
AMG used to actually mean something, now AMG badging is a feature that means nothing (Like M cars).
The popularity of SUVs is incredibly logical given the fact that their downsides have been largely eliminated. They don’t chug gas anymore, they don’t ride like a truck anymore, again, where’s the downside? A sedan gives you a worse cargo space and more difficult entry/exit, lower view of the road, more annoying for car seats and kids, etc.
Mercedes is doing just fine selling SUVs.
This is a similar story to the death of the coupe and the manual transmission. There was a time when having two doors or manual transition cut down on labor and manufacturing costs significantly and they were sensible compromises for customers. It’s just not true anymore, and what you’re left with is a typical non-enthusiast buyer that says “why would I want a car with less functionality/is harder to drive?”
It’s easy to criticize about M or AMG being watered down but they have a pretty distinctive product separation between the true performance models and sport trims.
And to be honest, the sport trims are much more sensible purchases for most buyers than a full blown M/AMG vehicle with all the sticker price, fuel economy and maintenance baggage they entail.