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BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

motor1.com

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Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#201

Post by wongarsu »

2143 wrote: post #44
EveYoung wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a new way to pay for already existing options? Instead of paying the full cost in advance, you can spread it over the product's lifetime, and once the car gets resold, the new buyer can "configure" it as they prefer.

That's assuming manufacturers wouldn't already include the price of rentable hardware in the cost of the car. Would any manufacturers do that? Why would a manufacturer fit in hardware for heated seats into a car, and not charge you for it? Because they hope you will subscribe to the heated seats? This argument breaks down in markets like India, middle East, Malaysia etc where it's hot and humid, and nobody would want…

The cost of installing heated seats might be at least partially included in the base price. But that's different from the price they charge for buying heated seats. The $300-$500 you currently pay for heated seats are not reflective of the price to run a couple resistive wires through a seat, they are reflective of what people are willing to pay for the convenience and status of heated seats.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#202

Post by ghostpepper »

_fat_santa wrote: post #195
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #79

We are rapidly moving towards Feudalism. If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced. As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either. So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, pr…

I have to disagree because at the end of the day, the consumer has a choice. BMW, Stellantis and other car makers are charging subscriptions for features. I see an immediate solution: buy another car. I see this argument a ton, people complain that new cars are too expensive, super high monthly payments and subscription features. Yes these are all problems but they are only problems if you choose to buy a new car. Se…

Buying an old car doesn’t really solve the problem in general, it just solves it for you, temporarily.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#203

Post by ghaff »

prawn wrote: post #112
ausbah wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the value proposition with stuff like Spotify is different. a.) there are still services where you can own your copy of the music, there is still - at least some semblance of - consumer choice. b.) the amount and variety of music I listen to on Spotify and pay per month is WAY more than paying for individual songs (at least personally)

And I think there's some value in not actually having the music in physical form, at least as we knew it. I have fond memories of the music I discovered and enjoyed on tape and CD (only owned 2-3 records), but I don't miss the CD towers and shelves of video tapes. Even if you cart around audio files on 5TB portable drives, or have a drive per key location (home, office, etc) there are advantages to streaming. One les…

>Losing everything when you unsubscribe is shitty though. I guess that's the choice made.

Yes. There's nothing keeping anyone from buying the music they like even if it's just digital. Music is probably the thing that there's there's the greatest choice between renting and very reasonably buying.

I have a big library which I got in order a couple years ago. But I made the decision that there was no need--at this point--to buy any gaps. I'd just stream and could always buy pretty much anything I wanted at some point if I wanted to. (My interests are mostly very mainstream.)

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#204

Post by saiya-jin »

2143 wrote: post #31

I seriously hope this doesn't catch on. For cars with internal combustion engines, the company tends to get constant income via service thanks oil filters, other filters, and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be replaced (assuming people take it to authorised service centers, which I assume most people do when the car is relatively new). With the transition to EV, those avenues dry up because EVs need lesser maint…

Official service centers are a bad joke though. Especially for BMW you pay 2.5x the work of other, good service (tested this on oil change, liquids were the same). Then they also screw you on parts prices. Suffice to say I never went there again.

I never saw the reason to buy new cars which drop value tremendously in first 5 years, I am certainly not that rich to not mind. I rather buy 6-7 years old, BMW in this case, do maintenance in good unofficial garage and drive the car to the ground. If you find one, stick with it till you die.

First car (BMW E46 3-series) bought for 25% price of new, maintenance costs rather minimal, drove it for 10 years till clutch/transmission literally died.

Now we have again BMW (5-series F10 wagon), bought for 20% of the new, 6 years/90k km old. Obviously no clue how it will behave in future, but we paid 80k less for really premium safe family car, and my yearly maintenance costs have been around 500$ per year.

People sometimes do stupid decisions when they are driven mainly by emotions.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#205

Post by abeppu »

aeyes wrote: post #184
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #79

We are rapidly moving towards Feudalism. If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced. As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either. So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, pr…

Do those that 'own' a home today in the US really own it? You still have to pay property tax against the "property value" which is a completely arbitrary number set by an outsider. If you don't pay, you lose your home - that is not my definition of ownership.

But where did you get your definition of ownership?

Property taxes in the US predate the US as an independent country. Do you think the owner should be able to set the value? Should anyone be able to declare that their property is worth $0 and therefore no tax is owed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#206

Post by panick21_ »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #79

We are rapidly moving towards Feudalism. If someone can charge you for using things you already bought and 'own', then average man has no property rights. The fee could be increased at any time, or new fees could be introduced. As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either. So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord, pr…

> We are rapidly moving towards Feudalism.

I hate when people say that. This has literally nothing to do with the historic institution of feudalism. Its is the opposite of actually educating people on actual feudalism.

Its just using historical terms that people call not to be 'bad' so you don't actually have to explain the problem.

We are literally talking about people who can buy a BMW. Did BMW promise them heated seats when they sold it to you? Would you feel better if the service worker at the dealer would rip out 5mm of tubes to 'break' the heated seat? Would that make it Ok?

Also, this is the extreme, extreme minority of features from an extreme minority of cars, by the extreme of car manufactures. Calling this 'rapidly moving to Feudalism' is way overly dramatic.

> As the housing crysis deepens, average person will never own a home either.

High amount of home ownership is not the same as having a high quality of live. And its also not really accurate.

> So average person will be in the same position as a medieval serf, conpletely dependand on the whims of the lord,

The lord who sold the serf a BMW?

> probably living in debt starting from the student loan and dying in debt.

Many people manage to pay of their student loans and don't have to live in debt if they don't want to.

Many people want to take on debt in order to consume now rather then later, being in debt is not actually necessary bad.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#207

Post by sumtechguy »

nixpulvis wrote: post #176
wonderwonder wrote: post #170

Article didn't really cover this but do you still have to pay more for a car that has the heated seats and steering wheel options and then a monthly fee to use them or do all the target cars in SK come with these features standard? If you have to pay more just to have the option of paying to turn on the subscription then that is insane.

This is almost an irrelevant point. If the hardware is installed and you own the damn car, you should be able to turn on the damn heaters. Would be interesting to know I suppose though.

It does seem to rub people the wrong way. Of a 'wait I have the part but you want 20 bucks a month for me to use it?!' get out of here.

I watched one restaurant try something like this. It was a fairly high end restaurant. They came in and started charging for salads. They were so proud of 500-1000 extra per month they were making. What they did not notice was their clientele just decided to not be treated like that. The place went from 2 hour wait to get into, to the servers fighting to get tables, within a year, out of business 2 years later. They could have put the cost into the meal and no one would have batted an eye. Instead they came off as cheap and gouging.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#208

Post by naasking »

Anunayj wrote: post #10
Andaith wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're installing the hardware you _are_ paying for it, they just want to increase their profits by charging you more money to use the hardware you've already paid for! If it's _your car_ then all the features in the car _belong to you_. Why should you pay a third party additional monies to use features of an object that _you already own_. I think this is despicable, and I won't purchase a car that I can't own ou…

I think what the parent commenter implied to mean here is, they like when companies put in features (Razor and blade model) and add soft-locks to prohibit people from using them, because they a tech-savvy user can often find a way around it. They think this benefits them, because they can get a device (for example a printer) at cheaper prices at what would be possible, and find ways around (cartridge) soft locks.

> They think this benefits them, because they can get a device (for example a printer) at cheaper prices at what would be possible

They think that, but that's wrong. It creates an industry with skewed incentives and less competition. The company can obviously sell the item at the lower cost and thus provide more competitive options to the marketplace, but they're trying to limit competition via software locks instead.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#209

Post by Ajedi32 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #33

It would be nice if someone could figure out how to hack these into working without a subscription.

That should indeed be possible. And ideally it'd be illegal for the manufacturer to try to stop you.

I've thought about this a bit, and I feel like many of these sort of abuses could be mitigated rather elegantly with some sort of right-to-repair type legislation focused on providing consumers with the ability to modify their property as they see fit. Far less costly than trying to anticipate and ban every possible anti-feature manufacturers could build into their products.

Re: BMW heated seats subscription costs $18 per month in South Korea

#210

Post by aerique »

the_gipsy wrote: post #168
PaywallBuster wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you keep a car for something that will happen once per ~ 4 years?

It's rains more than once per 4 years.

Haha, wow... where are you from?

Better tell the people in the Netherlands they can't ride bikes then!

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