If this trend continues, I wonder at what point we will have to pay a fee to use the toilets we bought for our homes…
The seat heaters are usually connected with very simple cabling. So it would be easy to bypass and solder a switch to it…ugly, but I will never pay for a “heating subscription”. OK, I don’t drive a BMW, but who knows what insanity will befall other car makers. Or do they put security chips into the seats?
With a notification on your phone: “You are out of flushes, do you want to buy 20 for US$9.99?”
Easy to make fun of it. We often rant about software subscriptions. The argument for a subscription: bug fixes, support, … With the “heater subscription”: the heater is already IN the car, if it stops working you will have to pay top dollar for the repair, no updates, no new technology. This is where I draw the line. No BMW for me (I have a better car, just sayin’), and I’ll never buy a car where I have to “unlock” existing hardware…
My dad heard a news program once where this argument came up. “Why doesn’t Netflix have to pay their fair share?” And the answer, of course, is because Netflix is paying their gateway provider a positively obscene amount of money for bandwidth, and the people using Netflix are paying their ISPs for the data that they stream from Netflix.
Put more simply, everybody is already getting paid. If that amount isn’t high enough, then rates should be raised as appropriate so that everybody is getting compensated properly.
But “let’s charge the website owners” is effectively double-billing them, and serves no useful purpose other than to allow a company like AT&T to make more money for services they’re already currently contractually obligated to provide.
“Comfort Care”. A sub / warranty combo that enables additional features and provides an extended warranty on the climate control system for your vehicle as long as you maintain the subscription.
I’m only partially kidding. It would be bizarre, but it would at least be a value add.
There is a simple solution for that.
If the customers are not buying those cars anymore, the Manufacturer will quickly rethink their strategy. They are currently testing the market, and if the Veto is not big enough, they will increase the number of installed, but not working, “Features” of their cars.
And BTW, the Manufacturer is saving money on that, as the production become cheaper, by increasing the amount of parts they use from a single device, and by simplifying the assembly process by lesser variations.
And on the other side, the cars weight will be, depending on your normal configuration, increase significantly, which also results in higher costs for the customer for the extra fuel/energy needed to get the heavier car rolling.
I find this dubious. The cost of adding seat heaters to every single vehicle that rolls off the assembly line almost has to be higher than the cost of having separate units with separate feature packages - otherwise wouldn’t they have just done this already?
You don’t want to know what the “subscription costs” for keeping a horse running are. And there are significant “back end” services that require periodic maintenance.
Here’s the UK list of Subscription Optional Extras:
Heated Steering Wheel
Heated Seats
Adaptive High Beams
Adaptive Cruise Control
Sport Sounds
Entertainment System upgrades
Wireless CarPlay
Map Updates (ok, this one might be alright)
Map Updates would be OK for me. IF THEY ARE NOT TRYING TO SELL REBRANDED OSM OR GOOGLE MAPS! Remember when you had to buy the “map CD” for $400 or more?
Oh yeah. My 2006 Lincoln LS had a CD player mounted in the trunk just for the map CD.
My current car is a “connected” vehicle meaning it uses cloud services for maps, route guidance, etc. and the service is a full subscription that lasts 4 years with no cost to me. Not sure what happens when the 4 years is up.
Mine also has a “connect” service. It downloads warnings, “better speech recognition”, points of interest, map updates, weather info, street signs, unlock/lock via smartphone, check car staus on smartphone, car tracking (theft),… A lot of that is useless, because I use CarPlay for a lot of those things. But we can argue there’s some value there and infrastructure/servers and an app on the phone are needed.
I too use CarPlay much of the time (but not always). It just works better, especially for texts and podcasts via Siri.
It may depend on demographics, but apparently there are lots of people who do not have smartphones, at least according to some of the auto manufacturers. I’m told that’s one reason why the auto manufacturers have not simply given up on infotainment systems and just use apps like CarPlay or Android Auto. Although Apple’s showing of the next CarPlay at WWDC this year may push in that direction pretty firmly.
