Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 197 posts

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#71

Post by Workaccount2 »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #4

The 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.

Step one: Rush underdevelop product to market so its ridden with bugs and security flaws.

Step two: Charge subscription fee to get paid to finish developing product

Step three: Add useless features and do confusing redesigns to justify subscriptions

Step four: "Subscriptions are necessary to cover ongoing costs"

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#72

Post by kevincox »

screamingninja wrote: post #70
kevincox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money and prices are fungible so it isn't really possible to prove anything. But there are two very reasonable ways to look at it. 1. Those who purchase the heated seats cover the cost of all of these heating wires. So they are paying much more than the raw cost (but presumably less than if their cars needed a separate / modified production line). 2. The manufacturer is paying these costs as a "marketing fee" hoping…

Your concept is mathematically sound, but if there exists an opportunity to double dip to boost profits, what would make a corporation turn it down? As you noted in case #1, companies are paying much more for the materials. Consumers are still ultimately paying for it. The entire point of amortizing the upfront costs is to keep the consumers hooked by charging a smaller recurring amount that stings less but certainly…

> companies are paying much more for the materials

They are paying more for materials but less for manufacturing costs and overhead. The total cost is less. So by your logic consumers are paying less than before.

> keep the consumers hooked by charging a smaller recurring amount

Yes, I disagree with the subscription model. I am talking more about one time payment for a hardware-locked feature.

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#73

Post by dabinat »

I think it would be different if heated seats had never existed before now. The fact that they are relatively standard in modern cars of a certain price range, and there are many other manufacturers who don’t charge a subscription for them, made this feel like people were having something taken away from them.

I don’t know that heated seats is a hill I would personally die on, but I’m just glad that pushback is taking place so manufacturers get the message that there are limits to what they can gate behind a paywall.

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#74

Post by screamingninja »

ano-ther wrote: post #64
WalterBright wrote: post #29

> 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.)

I also wouldn’t pay for this. But the economics are more interesting. BMW and AWS ran a quantum computing challenge two years ago. One of the tasks was to figure out all the combinations of features that need to be tested (sometimes destructively) [1]. I would imagine that having features installed in all vehicles provides a less taxing testing regime than having a physical option. And in addition, it will be cheaper…

> I would imagine that having features installed in all vehicles provides a less taxing testing regime than having a physical option.

Curious to learn the underlying economics, but not sure how software-locking features would make testing any easier. While different configurations would create somewhat unique feature-sets, not having to test some features on a certain percentage of vehicles (I imagine a testing technician looking at the missing buttons and writing down "N/A") seems more efficient than having to test every feature on every vehicle in an attempt to oversimplify.

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#75

Post by mym1990 »

Flatcircle wrote: post #30

Oh that's too bad, as a consumer, I would have loved to have been obligated to pay for that feature in perpetuity.

This is assuming that the feature set of the car is free, and then you unlock features as you subscribe to them. I could be wrong, but BMW is probably not selling you the heated seats model at the same price as the base model(again, could be wrong here)!

If they were, its an interesting proposition...the heated seats are there but behind a paywall...I would say the long term economics of it probably don't favor the consumer given that BMW is doing this to make more money.

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#76

Post by thumbsup-_- »

WalterBright wrote: post #27
thumbsup-_- wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a case can be made for not charging for software maintenance and upgrades since the customer has already paid for that cost while buying the device (or just include it in the device cost). Take Apple as an example. Software upgrades are free. It actually works in their benefit to give free software since they don't need to be backwards compatible for decade(s). Charging for actual recurring fee services like dat…

I was forced to upgrade my 2015 iPhone because apps started "winking out", one at a time. No error message, they just wouldn't open anymore. It was surely the automatic free upgrades to the OS and the apps that broke them. I was surprised, though, that it would "upgrade" my phone to apps that wouldn't work anymore and didn't bother to say it wouldn't work. Bought a new phone, transferred my setup over, and they start…

Yes that is also a problem. The best software is the one which is stable and isolated entirely such that no dependencies change and is also never upgraded. Nothing usually breaks in it. As an owner you buy the entire package hardware + software in its stable form and you can keep it running as long as you want.

With new cars, what I dread the most is scenario where something breaks after an upgrade, especially after car is out of warranty. Would that mean I need to get an expensive repair, or an entirely new car just because my 5yr old hardware isn't compatible with latest software?

I want a car which is reliable enough (including the software) to run as long as I want to keep it even if it's decades. May be keeping cars for decades is about to become a distant reality

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#77

Post by bonestamp2 »

bshep wrote: post #36

Probably 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.

Why did you eliminate them exactly... you don't want the added weight of the heated seat since you had no use for that option?

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#78

Post by toxik »

ssharp wrote: post #58
vasco wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect one reason why this flopped so heavily with consumers is because heated seats are a well-established luxury feature, in which consumers clearly see a line between the hardware costs and the upgrade price. When you eliminate that line and recognize that you've been charged for hardware you're not using, it feels wrong to many. I doubt many people realize any feature limiting in something as obscure as a CPU.

The reason it flipped is that it’s a SUBSCRIPTION. That’s just insanely obvious nickel and diming.

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#79

Post by bonestamp2 »

ketralnis wrote: post #28
gnicholas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In either of these cases the car you exchanged your money for physically had the seat heaters in it already. You were buying (or renting) the password to be allowed to use your own belongings. To me this isn't nuanced at all. It's my fucking car, get out of here with this rent-seeking DLC shit.

It is nuanced. If they did not sell the car for a penny more than last years model without heated seats, in other words they put up the money for the heated seat hardware in hopes of recouping that cost (and making their usual profit on it) later, then I don't see why people have a problem with getting the same features for the same price as last year.

In fact, as someone who likes to buy lightly used cars, I love this idea even more... even though the original buyer didn't want heated seats, I can still have them for the original option price? SOLD! (I would not do the subscription option of course)

Re: BMW drops controversial heated seats subscription

#80

Post by booi »

cs0 wrote: post #52
gorkish wrote: post #31

Awesome! Now do Chamberlain MyQ who want you to charge you to open your own garage door!

I bought a MyQ garage door system and I'm not required to pay any subscription fees to use the hub and sensors. Do you have any more info?

I think they're talking about if you want to integrate MyQ with other services you need to pay for their subscription. But that feature requires both engineering and ongoing hosting services from Chamberlain... so I don't know but it feels justified to have to pay a subscription for it.

Using MyQ through their own app is free. If anything that seems like a deal to not have to pay subscription.

Post reply on HN