AutoBMW will no longer charge you extra to use your own car’s hardware featuresGerman marque pulls a U-turn on controversial monthly subscription for activating heated seatsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AutoBMW will no longer charge you extra to use your own car’s hardware featuresGerman marque pulls a U-turn on controversial monthly subscription for activating heated seatsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
German marque pulls a U-turn on controversial monthly subscription for activating heated seats
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: BMW)
(Image credit: BMW)
Rewind a few years, and this very writer was sitting in a stylishly furnished conference hall in Munich, listening to BMW executives talk about how it planned to offer subscription services that would unlock “upgrades" in customer’s cars.
Often dubbed “microtransactions” in the multimedia world, these subscription packages would allow BMW owners to download over-the-air software upgrades to unlock things like Remote Engine Start via a smartphone, or the ability to turn parking cameras into a dash cam with a BMW Drive Recorder mode.
Things were going relatively well until the sharply dressed exec on the stage unveiled the company also planned to charge customers to unlock hardware features,such as heated seats, that were factory-fitted but pinned behind a paywall until the owner coughed up a monthly fee. Said Munich conference hall was filled with displeased mutterings.
It might come as no surprise then that BMW has now pulled a U-turn on the decision to charge customers to activate hardware functionality.
Speaking toAutocar, BMW’s board member for sales and marketing, Pieter Nota, said: “We are now focusing with those ‘functions on demand’ on software and service-related products, like driving assistance and parking assistance, which you can add later after purchasing the car, or for certain functions that require data transmission that customers are used to paying for in other areas.
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However, BMW isn’t the only manufacturer experimenting withAmazon Prime-style subscription packages, asMercedes-Benzraised a few eyebrows when it announced the Acceleration Increase functionality on its EQE andEQSmodels, which effectively increased the power output of its luxury EVs.
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