Your average car will have a lifespan of around 200,000 miles, and it can take anywhere between 12 and 14 years to reach that depending on how much you drive. That’s bad news for car companies, since they want money. So they have been looking for ways to get more money out of their customers. One way BMW thought of was charging people a subscription for heated seats, but thankfully, that is going away.
BMW’s board member for sales and marketing, Pieter Nota, said that the car maker would only require subscription for “software and service-related products” going forward. When asked about the infamous seat heating subscription, he said that the company wouldn’t charge a subscription for that anymore, and that features such as seat heating would be pre-installed from the factory. Talking about it, he said that “what we don’t do any more – and that is a very well-known example – is offer seat heating by this way. It’s either in or out. We offer it by the factory and you either have it or you don’t have it.”
The car maker began testing a paywall for car heat seating and other features in July last year. If you wanted heated seats, you would need to fork out $18 a month, while BMW also offered subscriptions for things such as having a heated steering wheel. This was met with backlash from BMW car owners and, in general, from everyone, as locking out features a car has under a subscription model is kind of a bad look. It got to the point where owners began worrying whether this would become a segment-wide trend, and companies like Volvo had to do damage control.
Heated seats aren’t an essential feature by any means, and they usually command a premium from the standard model of the car, but that premium is paid as part of the initial price of the car and owners can choose whether it’s something they want or not. If they’re installed from the factory, you should have the ability to use it. Otherwise, if you’re locked out by software of features your car has, it’s like you don’t really own your car.
Source: PCMag
