Technology

Going forward, BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.

The fuck it is. You offer car features at time of sale. And if you want me to like your brand, at best you offer OTA or wifi updating for free to enhance the experience, and make me want to buy your next car.

You try and nickel and dime me for shit technology that has been around for 20 years, and I could give two fucks. I'll plug in my phone, ignore your entire. Infotainment and actively campaign for it to fail and blow up in your face.

Did cars peak around 2016? That's when you could get a plug in hybrid, with Bluetooth audio, a rear view camera, but no spyware or mandatory subscriptions. Sure they'd pester you to get SiriusXM but you could just say no.

Pretty sure signal lights are a subscription option, and nobody that drives a Beemer has subscribed.

give up

No. That's not what companies do.

BMW and Mercedes were the "leaders" in milking their customers and thus they got the most bad press. All BMW is doing is waiting until more companies start doing this and the whole idea of subscriptions in the car business becomes normalized to the public.

Unless consumers continue to shun this concept and the press blasts these companies for trying to push this nonsense, it will make a comeback in the years to come. Unfortunately, I simply do not think consumers will look at their long-term interests. Its like telling gamers not to pre-order the hottest upcoming releases because it encourages companies to release buggy software... all the pleading in the world ends up falling on deaf ears. Same too, I believe, will happen in the car market.

HA, I read the title and thought "what is going on? I love my seat warmers" - I completely overlooked the word subscription because it is absolutely absurd that there would be an ongoing cost to the consumer for a feature that provides no ongoing cost to the manufacturer.

I hate everything about the idea of paying a subscription for a....{checks notes}...car. It's already bad enough when people are paying monthly for car payment or lease payment, now they get hit with a subscription for software?

I hate this timeline.

Heated seats is my goto example as an attack on ownership. Good to see it stop but I don't want your proprietary software or SaS either. Give me a dumb car with no computer.

BMW really doesn't understand this business model. They tried to pull this shit with CarPlay in 2018 as well. Which one could buy as an €300 option, which was rediculous by itself, but was later moved to a fucking subscription.

It also caused a huge uproar, largely forgotten by Covid now, but they also had to backtrack that. And now they've tried it again, also to backtrack again.

Fix your cars to be a better value prop than that fuckface's or the Chinese cars. Then you'll make tons of money. Not by nickel and diming your customers.

Just a reminder that if consumers hate it enough, they can have the power to change those decisions. If they or content or "don't care" they are passively agreeing and allowing it continue. Let your voices be heard, share articles like the Mozilla investigating car companies that collect your sex life and biometrics. Let your representatives know.

Damn, who would've guessed people are tired of subscriptions?

Someone must've found an easy way to jailbreak their cars

Subscription based models is how they kill the second hand car market. No one will touch a BMW with a subscription off lease.

This has to end, somehow. Or pretty soon we will have shoes with soles subscription: you want a proper shoe, you will have to pay a monthly quota.

I would love to see the sales metrics that made them backpedal

[...] but subscriptions for software-based new car features will continue, according to a BMW board member.

I wonder what they're going to try to nickel and dime people over next. I mean, if they're offering internet service/access or other things that are an ongoing service, fine. That's mostly fair... but if they're charging you to flip a bit in the car's internal database (or even worse, a central database somewhere that keeps your car's data) but the feature is installed in your car and costs BMW nothing to enable it, then ewwwwwww

Took a deeper look at the article...

[...] BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.

Hahahahahaha no. For the most part, absolutely no.

Next: brakes subscription 😁

Seems a little bit like when your cell phone carrier disables the tethering feature on your phone and wants to charge you money to enable that. For me, infuriating to know that I'd paid to have hardware capable of being a wifi hotspot, then to be charged to use it. The "service" being provided amounts to first-we-degrade-the-thing-you-paid-for, then we-charge-you-ransom-to-get-it-back.

Look, it's shitty that they're putting this stuff behind a software lock and subscriptions just like the shitty practices of the gaming world but with shitty behavior comes opportunity with the cracking world.

No way, I cannot believe that didn't work. Shocked

there was a subscription to pay for fucking heated seats?? even when you buy a car you dont buy a car

Good, good, don't buy that shit people.

Good. Wtf

This is the sort of reason that we need the capacity to jailbreak cars, or install your own on-board computer system that controls car shit.

I want FOSS car software, or would if I drove.