BMW Commits to Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle

The assumption is that every peasant on the road will stop, move out if their way and politely greet them because of the higher BMW status. Just as they in turn have to defer to a Bentley or Rolls Royce. The hierarchy of cars.

You joke but I actually had a co-worker once tell me that “I’m an adult, I don’t need to tell others where I am going.”

It won't work for so many millions when Chinese cars are skyrocketing, competing on price with them is crazy. Combustion engines require advanced engineering, but electric ones are absolutely basic, we must look for another element that differentiates these brands, I would pay more for good open source and auditable privacy software that I know is not going to leave me stranded at the first opportunity.

If it's already built into the car the car won't be any less expensive just because the features is locked behind a subscription.
Even if you don't buy the subscription, you already payed for the feature since they already built it into your car. They didn't do that for free and hope that you pay for it later.

Your statement is misleading.

From Google.

"Yes, some Volvos are made in China*, as Volvo operates several manufacturing plants there (Chengdu, Daqing, Taizhou) to serve the Chinese and Asian markets, though models for the US and Europe often come from Sweden, Belgium, or the U.S., with some Chinese-made Volvos even exported globally, but recent US-bound models tend to be produced in Europe or the US. The Chinese-owned Geely group owns Volvo, and production locations vary by model, with Chinese plants focusing on specific models like the S90 and XC60 for Asia, while Swedish and Belgian plants produce for Western markets."

I'm not in these markets nor am I looking at either of these models made in China.

pass it on

(100 iterations later)

"Yo, John fucks deer, pass it on!"

Ukrainian hackers have been doing custom John Deere firmware for ages I believe.

Fair point yeah. Miata feels fast because you can actually drive it in its power band without getting in trouble. Sick car.

I think just based on personal preference I would rather go for a 128i than a miata. They are such good value and surprisingly cheap to run.

My next and probably final sports car will be a 2008/09 cayman S. They appear to just work with just regular maintenance. Some owners have like 500,000km haha

Clutch felt like shit in my 2011 335i too. You need to delete the clutch delay valve ever since the e90 series, it's intended for idiots to prevent burning the clutch but all it does is numb the whole thing. $20 quick fix

I appreciate them but not really my thing for some reason

Most reliable BMW you can get is one of the later year n52 cars. 2011 or so 328i is going to run forever, just a couple of oil gaskets that need changed every few years. If I was in the market for a $5000 car right now it would be my pick

It's funny how BMW maintains the image that they are rich people cars when they've been making cheap trash for like 10 years now. A BMW is literally cheaper than Toyota at this point

Yup and Toyota and all the other major companies have been selling your data since 2018. Some even earlier.

I have to partially disagree on this point. Take the first generation of Raspberry Pi as an example.

The first Raspberry Pis came with hardware to decode certain video codecs, but this feature was protected by royalties (not by the Raspberry Pi foundation, but a third-party I don't remember the name of). They decided to sell you the base hardware for cheap, and if you wanted to enable hardware decoding you could later purchase a license key for your specific device, which could then be used to flip a switch in the firmware.

In my opinion it makes sense: I would rather pay 35€ + optionally 5€ for that feature, rather than 40€ mandatory.

Manufacturer are going SDV, whether we like it out not. Software defined vehicle. They're a computing platform on wheels.

Like a computer or a smartphone, buying the hardware does not grant you access to all software ever made for that plateform.

Hopefully one day we'll see some computing hardware standardization across brands and openness for third party apps and subscriptions.

The current status of being at the mercy of a single vendor is terrible. Given standardized and similar computing hardware and APIs, I'd like to try Mercedes or Cadillac or Tesla's FSD one month each and see which one I prefer and can afford.

Technically they haven't paid for the feature yet, it just so happens that it's cheaper to manufacture without having a second line of non-heated seats which makes me think "why not just include heated seats (and enabled) as standard?"

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? I'm only pointing out that if BMW wanted to have a heated/non-heated seat options it costs more to set up and operate a separate manufacturing line to support both options. That's just a fact of running production lines.

Furthermore I'm questioning their business logic here with going with the subscription model because, as shown in the thread here, it only generates negative press, so why even bother with the subscription model and just have heated seats as standard. No subscription model for hardware BS needed, it makes the brand look more luxurious, and it'd be a great selling point in the dealerships to say "all these bad bois come with heated seats as standard".

They can just adjust the baseline cost to include the heated seats if they need to preserve that margin.

I'd guarantee that they're already doing that now anyway. If you buy a new car but don't choose the heated seats optional extra, the seats will still have the capability, just that they won't enable it. This has been going on for decades; I recall an old Peugot 405 my parents had when I was young, there were various placeholder areas on the console where some switches would have bee on the more expensive models. All the wiring would be there, but just no phsyical switch on the console. They'll standardise as much as possible to make the production process as simple and cheap as possible.

I can see the appeal from a potential customers point of view as you don't need to stress about picking the wrong options and later regretting it.