Awesome! Now do Chamberlain MyQ who want you to charge you to open your own garage door!
BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
31–40 of 197 posts
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#32It's not controversial, everyone thinks it's ridiculous
It was actually a little more nuanced — they offered a one-time purchase (at a normal-ish price), or the option to purchase via subscription. I have no problem with this arrangement, which literally offers consumers more choices. The concerns I would have are (1) that the one-time pricing would gradually creep up, so that in a few years it becomes untenable, or (2) that when you sell the car, the heated seats would b…
I will not pay extra for heated seats. I will also not be paying for heated seat hardware that is deactivated behind a paywall.
When I buy a physical object, that is my object. If they want to charge subscription fees they can do it on something they own. If they want to charge for new functionality they can do it own something they own.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#33> which was actually not true, but perception is reality
This is beyond stupid.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#34It's not controversial, everyone thinks it's ridiculous
One wonders why the automaker's can't just charge a reasonable monthly fee for 1. tracking where you left your car parked, and 2. remote-locking your car. I would vastly prefer that to playing games with our data, or trying all these gimmicks like charging for extra acceleration.
They already know where you parked your car. The fee would be for sharing that info with you. But then the sheeple would wake up to what BMW tracks, so it's a classic espionage dilemma.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#35> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality It was true. The heating wires in the seats were already installed and the consumer paid for them and owned them. I remember in the olden days some compiler vendors added a fee to "unlock" floating point code support. That was never popular (I never did such with my compilers.)
It's not like there's no precedent, almost any significantly complex analog design will include a bunch of hardware that is disabled on the customer chip even if it's there, commonly GPUs and CPUs. There's more gadgets like this where it's cheaper to produce the same thing for everyone but price them differently.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#36Probably a good idea, I pretty much eliminated them from the list of possibilities when shopping for a car this year because of this. I’m just one data point but I’m pretty sure im not the only lost sale.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#37Paywalled features really cheapen a brand. Nothing about a monthly subscription to activate existing services really screams "premium" to me.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#38The right way to sell subscriptions is for services that actually incur ongoing costs for the company. Charging a subscription for hardware and software already built into the car, and not dependent on any external servers or anything is just plain anti-consumer. There are plenty of services BMW can charge for that people will happily pay, like remote start, remote monitoring etc.
>Charging a subscription for hardware and software already built into the car, and not dependent on any external servers or anything is just plain anti-consumer. What's the principle here? That because it already exists, consumers don't have to pay for it? How far can we stretch this? Suppose there's a streaming service (eg. netflix or spotify) that supports downloads, does that it's "anti-consumer" to deny them acce…
Here's the extreme example I always reach for: Imagine BMW decides that it's cheaper for them to just make all 4 seat sedans instead of having some 2 seat models and some 4 seat models. They instead tell customers: "You're buying a 2-seater. You need to pay a $X/month 'sedan fee' to be allowed to sit in the rear seats." Would this be acceptable to many people? Of course not, and for the same reason that subscriptions for other things that are already part of your car should also be unacceptable.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#39Yeah, that was never going to work out.
Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription
#40> People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality It was true. The heating wires in the seats were already installed and the consumer paid for them and owned them. I remember in the olden days some compiler vendors added a fee to "unlock" floating point code support. That was never popular (I never did such with my compilers.)
It's not like there's no precedent, almost any significantly complex analog design will include a bunch of hardware that is disabled on the customer chip even if it's there, commonly GPUs and CPUs. There's more gadgets like this where it's cheaper to produce the same thing for everyone but price them differently.
There are two common versions of this. There's "produce the same chip for everyone, test it, disable the bits that don't pass, figure out the maximum speed it runs as, sell things that turned out better for a higher price", which seems quite reasonable for a process with variable yield. Then there's "produce the same chip for everyone, soft-disable features for people who don't pay to unlock them", which seems much less reasonable. (Perfectly legal, and should be, just obnoxious and unpleasant.)