BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat | Hacker News Reader

BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat

theautopian.com

98 pointsCharlesW104 comments

What a spectacularly efficient means to devalue a once “premium” brand. I guess “good will” didn’t get its own line item on their balance sheet.

It's on page 46 https://www.bmwgroup.com/content/dam/grpw/websites/bmwgroup_...

Goodwill is supposedly €1.504B.

Goodwill measures, IIRC, the difference between the value of a company's material assets and its market cap.

Beyond Gen X, does anyone younger consider BMW a luxury brand?

What brands would you think younger people consider a luxury brand? They do make smaller and sportier cars, but 5-series and up, X5 and up, those seem firmly in the luxury car category to me.

Public transit (trains)

At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car. Not a supercar, but beyond the reach of most of the car-buying public. I'm surprised that the generally quite wealthy owners of those cars would tolerate that.

It suggests that BMW must be in dire financial straits somehow, and I’ve been trying to decide why. Current theory is that it’s part ‘BMW needs to prop up their share price with a steroid injection of ads into their growth in growth of profit curve’, and part ‘BMW lost the evaporating upper middle class segment and is on the verge of collapse’

It’s such a look of desperation to add advertisements when they didn’t start out as a carnival-barker brand that it’s hard to continue trusting their vehicle manufacturing. Look at how poorly they rank in reliability perception relative to Jaguar and Subaru — and only two steps away from ‘We’re selling your radio data to stay afloat’ GM, too?! https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/06/29/2025-jd-power-initial-qua...

Ugh. I may not personally like their cars but I still hate to see it when notable brands swan-dive into the rocks rather than just wind down gracefully. Hopefully Toyota handles this better, given they’re facing a financial engineering crisis of their own with operating profits down to a mere 2.5% of sales: https://www.toyota-industries.com/investors/item/2025_annual... anyways

> Sato has claimed Toyota is in a “battle for survival” against Chinese automakers. Going forward, the company will have to loosen its infamously strict quality standards to cut costs and increase output.

— https://www.autonocion.com/us/toyota-crisis-chinese-evs/

> 2023: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/toyo...

You can safely assume it's only getting worse until proven otherwise.

Many car companies have managed to fail and cease operations without destroying their brand with, as the article title describes it, “showing commercials on their car’s dash screens”. While I agree that they’re as greedy and shitty as the other companies — though GM and Rivian have them beat on that for denying CarPlay over its data processing protections! — it’s too early to identify which brands will next self-immolate with video ads like this.

It’s infuriating to see that if Toyota would just stop trying so hard to sell cars, they wouldn’t be at risk of this. Something like 90% of their sales profits on a 25% markup from production cost are spent on marketing to get each sale?! That reeks of the same kind of desperation to show growth in growth of profits that BMW is showing, so they’re definitely in the at-risk category now.

Mozilla is leveling this criticism? How about leading by example?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

Thanks to altairprime for mentioning it first:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137765

Mozilla is right to level criticism, regardless of hypocrisy.

The internal debate around the Mr. Robot events was even more fiery than the public reaction, and while the Corporation has busily continued enshittifying, that does not excuse dismissing the Foundation’s critique of auto manufacturers. You’re not only confusing two entirely separate business entities that are formally operated apart from each other, that would risk 501(c)(3) revocation if they fail to maintain that chasm — you’re discrediting a serious and real breakdown of privacy violations on the grounds of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy does not invalidate legitimate objections. It could, if these had been the same organization as you assumed, invalidate the stated and unstated motivations driving publication. Concrete facts and negative reviews present by an unpalatable and biased source may still be accurate and relevant. What motivation did you consider suspect here, and why do you feel should invalidated their claims regarding auto manufacturers? You could well be right, after all, and I’d rather consider your full viewpoint than dismiss it for being incomplete.

I wasn't saying that this invalidates the objection. I was (very clearly) asking them to lead by example. Regardless of the legal structure, the non-profit should still be calling the shots, and should still be vetoing efforts like the Mr. Robot tie-in (which their reps agree with, if you follow the story).

The reason I think the hypocrisy is interesting is that (as I've said before[1]) the contrast should be a source of insight, and it's right to expect a organization concerned about the public to use said insight. Here, the insight is:

"Okay, you're ostensibly non-profit and pro-user and yet you still forced ads on the user. You already got the lecture on it being bad and supposedly agree with it, so what happened? What would have aligned your incentives, and how can that be applied more generally?"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121059

> the non-profit should still be calling the shots

I truly wish this were the case sometimes. Perhaps things would have gone differently for us if it had been. One can dream. Maybe someday they’ll do it, anyways.

I don't know. I think the goalpost is constantly being moved as to what is acceptable, and they're just trying to squeeze out more revenue per car sold.

And what better way to do so by using this large space in a car?

Thank God they downloaded it over their own 4G connection, not the one I pay for (yes I got the message this morning in my iDrive 7 car...).

Choosing to move that particular goalpost suggests financial problems, though. If they were making excellent cars and a reliable profit growth at the same rate as a growing U.S. upper middle class population, then they’d be completely set for life and would never have had to stoop to this. What isn’t clear yet is whether their apparent failure is rooted in macroeconomic, manufacturing, and/or operations — but choosing the “race to the bottom” indicates they are no longer a luxury brand, and that’s their golden goose killed and eaten for a promo. Look to the absolute wreckage done to the Firefox brand solely by the Mr. Robot promo, as an HN-recognized example in a more familiar industry, and that destruction was to a free brand!

> More importantly, these advertising anti-features gravely - perhaps terminally - violate user trust. This event tells us that “Firefox studies” into a backdoor for advertisements, and I will never trust it again. But it doesn’t matter - you’re going to re-enable it on the next update. You know what that means? I will never trust Firefox again.

(6.5 years ago, 1385 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941799

Wow $50k for a base 3 series now? That feels like a rip off. Especially if you're getting ads!

Are they "tolerating" it? They literally have no choice.

They have a choice in brands at the very least.

I thought all car brands did this

> At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car.

No they most definitely are not.

They're marketed as high end, but their engineering is a tour de force of cost cutting behind the scenes.

I just got rid of my 2024 BMW i4 xdrive40, for an electric awd subaru-toyota-lexus joint effort platform (there are a few variations, all related in engineering) and it's like jumping several years into the future, including efficiency, which is roughly 25% higher in the japanese (more modern) cars, the handling dynamics on the japanese platforms are far more refined, and then vastly less shitty interior materials, except the BMW seating which was good.

I've driven BMW "high end cars" for about 11 years, and emphatically recommend looking at Audi, Mercedes, and Subaru/Toyota joint efforts, as well as Tesla and Rivian, depending on what you seek.

$0.02 from someone who spent a fortune and lived and learned.

> > At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car.

> No they most definitely are not.

> They're marketed as high end, but their engineering is a tour de force of cost cutting behind the scenes.

Whether you personally like it or not has no impact on the product positioning. BMW is a luxury car brand [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW

that's what i refer to by the marketing...and it carries indeed over into the pricing, and carries over into the insurance rates to repair at such pricings.

If you think like that then what makes a car luxury is not whether it's a good car, not whether it's comfortable, not anything at all about the car.

This reasoning makes the price it's own argument. It's supposed to be good because it's expensive and only because it's expensive. The car itself is beside the point (and the car's quality will of course soon be sacrificed by management to the insatiable gods of profit)

I'd rather have a good comfortable luxury car.

Is there any brand of any product which is not subject to extreme cost-cutting these days?

Skoda seem to have a small budget, perhaps $5/car, to add features in. Nothing major: an ice scraper / tread depth gauge under the fuel cap; a parking ticket clip on the side of the windscreen - that sort of thing. It tends to be disproportionately popular with owners.

I don’t think is fair to compare Asian and German cars. I personally dislike Asian designs regardless of how reliable and efficient they are. Subarus are objectively ugly cars and they are not great as daily drivers. Lexus offer a closer driving experience as German cars, meaning you can have both a sporty and family car without the annoyance of a sport ride and noise of a WRX. But is still very Asian looking with the sharp angles, ugly headlights and large grills.

Interesting 0.02.

Recents for me: 2020 X5 xDrive40i, 2023 M340 xdrive, 2026 i4 xDrive40i.

When I bought the X5, I tried all sorts of other comparable models, both higher and lower price/quality.

I thought Lexus SUVs drove like 1990's era Mercury Grand Marquis -- "refined" is one way of putting it. Mazda claims their cars are solid handlers but my experience with three of them is, well, meh - very model dependent. Volvo SUV handling - refined, but the vehicles feel large.

Long way of saying - I feel when driving BMWs that they drive as the brand describes them: the ultimate driving machine. Refined is not the first word that comes to mind, but not far down the list.

2026 i4 is awesome. I won't argue the range. Pretty pathetic but that car isn't my range warrior anyways.

> 2026 i4 is awesome.

that's identical to my 2024 i4 xdrive40 (there's no i), _except_ the entire batch of i4 (i5,i7) built from late summer 2023 to early 2024 had faulty heat pump valve subsystems from Vitesco (subsidieary of Continental) and were basically all lemons. BMW never owed up or did a recall, but did multiple replacements of the subsystem until the cars stopped failing.

your 2026 is two years newer by model year than my 2024, so perhaps you've got a corrected design, as it happened after the model refresh in 2025.

If you are looking for luxury performance and can’t afford a Porsche or Ferrari but don’t want to look on a budget driving an Atlas or a Genesis then you only have BMW, Audi and Benz. The latter usually doesn’t appeal to under 60 except for AMG which is out of budget, so your decision always ends between Audi and BMW. They offer a different driving experience IMO, so if you are a beemer guy ads won’t deter you from buying one.

I have been recently looking at new cars in Europe and there is s massive difference in quality at all price tiers between Chinese and non Chinese cars.

Mind you, Chinese cars are often assembled in Europe and have to comply with all the safety laws etc, but at any price tier it feels you're getting a car that is 10k+ more expensive than it is.

And that's despite EU putting (non sense) sanctions on Chinese cars and components.

If Chinese were free to compete square and fair they would've long swallowed the European industry.

Like look at Volkswagen and what you get at 40k. A non base Golf, maybe?

It also grinds my nerves that European cars are less expensive anywhere but in Europe.

You go to US and they are like 15/20% less expensive.

The argument (which has its own pros and cons) is that the Chinese vendors are not competing fair and square.

The governmental/industrial coordination in China is quite literally un comparable to Western style industries so the western governments feel they have to protect their local industries.

This definitely hurts consumers in the short term, so the whole argument is about long term impacts.

Nothing stops western governments from adopting the tactics that work well.

Western populations do.

If western populations are so committed to failure, then failure is deserved.

If your definition of success and failure is based on how well your country motivates the production of consumer goods, I suppose that’s true.

This is bs.

Both German and Italian auto industries e.g. have received countless money.

FIAT alone got an equivalent of 200B+ euros in state/regional aid in Italy alone (that's ignoring the generous incentives of all the countries they opened plants).

Through capital and currency controls, the yuan is structurally undervalued between 9 and 25% depending on your source. That’s a direct transfer from the Chinese consumer to the Chinese exporter.

That’s hundreds of billions of dollars before we get to cash subsidies, IP subsidies, central direction, property right differences etc.

The Chinese approach is so different than the western approach that there isn’t broad consensus on how to quantify it, but it’s for sure more than the direct subsidies that something like the WTO was built to negotiate.

Chinese cars built in Europe are not taxed/sanctioned.

I think the base golf is around 30k.

(Renault, fiat and Citroen are better priced than German cars if you don't mind staying in the low-end. You still have park assist, Google/Apple carplay and they are still good on the road, but they feel less luxurious.)

Renault isn't on a lower tier than VW btw.

Like look at Volkswagen and what you get at 40k. A non base Golf, maybe?

If I recalled correctly, we got a higher-specced Id.3 for around that price (yes new). It's a great car.

But I am grumpy now, because they added Play Integrity (strong) to their app (which is handy for monitoring charging, etc.) and now I cannot run it on GrapheneOS. They also cut API access for Home Assistant users. I think we are probably an invisible blip on the radar, but our next car probably won't be VW.

It's like the entire western world has forgotten how to make things. And I don't blame the individual workers who are having to beg the billionaire capitalists for scraps to avoid going homeless or hungry. It's obviously been a high-level policy decision that we should forget how to make things.

For consolation, China will probably suffer the same effect, in about 20 years when it has its own billionaire capitalists who control it (currently it has some but they don't control it, also they are first-generation billionaires who are stuck to the productive activity that made them wealthy)

I have seen the bar at the top appear with "BMW has a surprise for you" or something, but I always use Android Auto which starts a second later so I have never seen what this was. Still unacceptable.

This upsets me so deeply in my core that so many companies do this instead of creating anything new for a customer to buy. I can't even process that someone would be mentally disturbed enough to even think of this, and not feel any shame.

Making things is hard. Making actual objects for people to buy is even harder.

That’s why they say not to “buy things and spend money on experiences instead ” and enshittify everything instead of creating new things. It’s not because an “experience” is actually better it’s because it’s easier to make one than make a useful or novel object.

Why make a new thing when you can just extract more money from people with less effort and there isn’t really anything to “make”.

The incentives are all wrong.

it's also because nobody on their deathbed regrets not having enough material objects

Pretty sure a lot of people do.

The ones not dying in a deathbed, or just a really crappy one, for example. When your environment constantly irritates or even hurts due to its quality, it is pretty rare to even spend and hour or two not thinking about that.

But most young people today have never experienced that. That's a good thing, but it leads to some very weird claims.

I agree, there's a minimum standard. But beyond that, it's vastly overrated, even more than you think. The person who backpacks around the world with nothing has a richer life than the person who sits in a gilded mansion. Donald Trump with his obsession with gold-plated everything is the epitome of wasting wealth on useless material displays.

Nope. That's not how people work. There's a minimum standard, which is rising all the time. It's about how you compare with everyone else somehow, and that goes up all the time.

Well that definitely depends.

I bought a speedboat a few years ago. And the memories I have been able to create with my friends and family because of it are irreplaceable. Fishing and camping trips, exploring areas only reachable by boat, etc…

Funko Pops? Meaningless plastic garbage. To me at least.

Boardgames and videogames? Hundreds of hours of entertainment I get to share with family and bond with my kids over. I have even purchased arcade cabinets of games I loved in my childhood that I now get to share with my own kids (on free play mode), and restoring the cabs has been a bonding activity with my kids.

There is nothing wrong with buying “things” if they can be used to create sentimental value.

I don’t need a deathbed to be able to look back and realize I missed out a lot because I didn’t want to buy a “things” at the time.

Humans have created sentimental value value out of objects for millennia. It’s human nature.

You said it yourself. You value the things that created experiences. I value the experiences I had with my tent and sleeping bag too, and with my computer.

I made experiences. I didn’t buy the experience itself. Which is what my first post was about.

Most people working at the top of these large organizations don’t know how to make anything net new anymore. They pushed all the people that do out when padding their nests.

13 hours ago: "BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising" (consumerrights.wiki)

211 points | 148 comments

I am a good bot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130756

Ha! Thanks.

BMW: The Ultimate Advertising Machine

Bayerische Mobile Werbung :)

LOL

I've driven several BMW's starting in the mid 90's. I recently picked up a used 2017 sight unseen from a dealer pretty far away. It was the only one available I could find that met my criteria.

The car was in superb shape and I'm happy with it, but I knew immediately after driving it that it would be the last BMW I ever purchased. This just seals the deal.

> I knew immediately after driving it that it would be the last BMW I ever purchased

Why?

It doesn't have that physical connection to the road the prior models had. I know a lot of this is the move to drive-by-wire with electric power steering and selectable modes. It drives like a nice car, but just feels a bit removed in comparison to the earlier cars.

Also, many other automotive manufacturers have caught up and provide very nice driving experiences as well. There seems to be less differentiate BMW from any other 'nice' car these days. Well, except ads.

All automakers are bad. Hope you like biking a lot. Reports are from 2023 but assume it's gotten even worse.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...

I like biking ok, but where I live it is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter for it to be a good mode of transportation. Even if the roads were better designed for bikers, everything was close enough, etc.

Google thought "Oh let's bundle a movie ad in an OS update": https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-theme-packs-la...

Also bad: On Volvos†, you are now prohibited from uninstalling the YouTube app.

I don't want to watch videos while I'm driving.

In the previous software, you could at least move it somewhere unobtrusive; but the latest version only displays icons alphabetically. No re-ordering anymore.

† Volvos have "Google Built-In," the bastard stepbrother of Android Auto, which also has an app in the car so you can have the worst of both worlds.

I saw a social media video of someone refusing to hit "Agree" on the Google user agreement dialog in a Volvo car. IIRC it just kept popping up nonstop...

Back to the era of spyware and bloatware preinstalled, just like the carrier phones used to be, but this time these are $30k-$40k or even $100k cars.

I am pretty sure it is a separate app that you have to install?

https://9to5google.com/2025/11/05/pixel-theme-packs/

Remember, folks: it's not illegal to remove ads from your car. And it's not illegal to open a business where people can bring their cars and you'll remove ads from them for money. And it's not illegal to wire the seat heaters to a switch on the dashboard.

Don’t worry, with the progress in AI we will build BR (for blocked reality) goggles which will obscure anything you have considered possibly objectionable from your environment and replaced it with something innocuous.

Will they detect BLIT patterns and other cognitohazards?

Every car given enough time will have ads. Just like every proprietary software will become enshittified. It should be obvious by now that the stock ticker must go up and to do that you have to squeeze your customers. And if they have already bought the car, they have no recourse.

The only solution I see is open-source but for cars, that’s a long ways out.

I have always been worried about self driving cars (even privately owned) being ad platforms. Guess we are getting there faster! Slate auto is not open source but at least they have no screens and I believe no driver tracking.

the billboards are moving into the cars, and if it is self driving then you have more time to stare at the ads.

You ask it to drive you to McDonalds, it takes you to Burger King because they paid it more. Since you are already there, instead of fighting the car you decide to just buy a Whopper.

> at least they have no screens

IIRC their dash is just a screen. No actual dials or gauges unfortunately. :(

This doesn’t seem like an inevitability. Low fare airlines began experimenting with selling ad space in their planes but that never resulted in the major airlines following suit. And that’s in one of the most cutthroat, lowest margin industries besides grocery stores.

I'm curious as to how anyone is going to push ads into my 1997 Range Rover. It barely has anything you'd recognise as a computer.

Wow amazing

I would drive straight back to the dealership and return it

With or without the trunk loaded with gas cans?

Where's my sledgehammer?

It is very amusing to me that the outrage is with the car manufacturer, not the ad economy.

The great irony of seeing ads in an article about how there is some arbitrary line between “you tracked me for no cost” and “I paid tens of thousands of dollars for this car” when it comes to where ads are no longer acceptable.

I wonder if advertisement was illegal, would that have effects on the economy other than the advertisement platforms not getting their cut?

I mean, in Europe there are no drug or doctor advertisements and in US there is. In London or Brussels the outdoor advertisements are much more limited than what’s happening in Tokyo or Istanbul. Do Europeans miss out on medicine? Do London business do worse than Istanbul?

I suspect that there’s a case for getting rid of advertisements but on the other hand the advertisement agencies are responsible for some of the greatest advancements in AI and computing, so maybe that’s the utility after all.

My 90s car has no screen. Auto industry needs to self correct before they collapse.

Screens are mandated by law in the US, I believe, for the backup camera.

My car has analog video (PAL) for the backup camera.

If a car manufacturer really wanted, I'm sure there's some loophole and/or malicious compliance possible.

return it as you bought it within 14 days if its a BTS vehicle.

Adblockers for cars?

It's legal to block ads on your car. It's legal to start a business installing adblockers on other people's cars.

Is there a cookie and gdpr consent bar at the beginning?

In-car adblockers would be nice.

I don't have a car like like that but I heard there's a terms and conditions screen in all internet-connected cars and that the sell agent immediately confirms all checkboxes while getting the car out for the buyer.

Yet another reason not to buy a BMW.

If you bought a car with a display instead of physical gauges, what did you expect to happen?

Every car has to have a display since the backup camera mandate.

Yes, mine too. I removed it and installed a chinese no-internet player instead (with Android Auto, but I'm not proud of that).

It’s a slow burn but I feel Europe is heading in a direction where vehicles will play a safety video every time you start up a vehicle, similar to what plays on airlines. Imagine a 3 minute video on rules of the road with no skip function and you have to click ‘agree’ before you can drive. Then you have cameras tracking your eyes, speed etc. They’ll automate license suspensions based on driving style. Maybe you’ll need to scan you license and/or face when the car starts too.

They won’t even be doing this to push people to use public transport. It’s just regular enshittification by big brother.

Did you know we have free healthcare if you wait three months tho

You made an account just to troll about European healthcare?

(I never wait three month though. If I call my GP, I have an appointment today or tomorrow. Same with our dentist, etc.)

Curious, my cardiologist will see me within a week, the specialized exams he prescribed were also a matter of days - ended up picking the day most convenient to me since they offered a wide range.

That's just something you've imagined, then got annoyed about.

They have to show this full-screen banner about driving safely with the buttons to turn it off disabled for a few seconds. It's annoying. I want to turn it off but I can't so I start driving and I am forced to look at the screen until the button to turn it off gets enabled. That's very unsafe. Have I read the text that's written there during 4 years I drive the car? Never.

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