I don’t mind hardware shipping locked and being an optional fee to unlock. I have paid for the rear heated seats in my model 3.
What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats?
Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
> What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs.
IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades.
I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car.
...and if I could continue paying this price and it would continue to work without third-party servers or network connectivity.
One of the worst problems with this subscription-based everything is that it creates an ongoing reliance on the company instead of allowing things to be pure local.
For example Netflix downloads are a huge pain because of refreshing and re-verifying. In theory these wouldn't exist if they didn't need to worry about your license expiring. You would never run into a scenario where you couldn't play the video that was stored locally because they can't prove that you are still subscribed (even though I'm only half way through my month so it is literally impossible for my subscription to have ended yet).
So yes, if I could guarantee that I could pay a fairly reasonable price for as long as I wanted to and it would work flawlessly for that entire time it wouldn't be too bad. But in practice I can't rely on that and have to dread the day I am offline and can't get heated seats or they take the licensing server down since it wasn't worth maintaining for the 8 people who are still subscribed to this service.
My Honda has heated seats. I bought the car in Hawaii and brought it to Socal with me. I didn't care about heated seats when I got the car at all. It just came with my trim. It was nice having it when I went skiing but I would never remember to turn on a premium service for one ski trip and then turn it back off. For a premium car I'd resent it on my ride up the mountain. It would ruin the experience for me entirely just because of how much I'd overthink the cost value benefit in my head. It would seriously make me unreasonably upset. Hard pass on any car that charges monthly for it.
I don't understand the mental gymnastic here. They built car with heated seats. You paid for car with heated seats that are technically fully functional but you can't use them until you pay even more. No, doesn't make sense to me.
> I don't understand the mental gymnastic here. They built car with heated seats. You paid for car with heated seats that are technically fully functional but you can't use them until you pay even more. No, doesn't make sense to me.
That's because you don't understand.
The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats. The manufacturer included them anyway, but disabled them in software.
Presumably, a consumer could go to the dealership and pay for heated seats as an aftermarket add-on. Or they could pay to enable heated seats (software unlock) on a month-to-month basis.
> The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats.
Well, when you buy a car your payment gives you ownership of the entire car.
There may not be a written contract or specification explicitly saying that the valves in the tyres are included in the deal, but they're your property nonetheless (in the absence of obvious errors like the dealer letting you drive the wrong car off the lot)
The customer paid for a car with heated seats present but inoperable. If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
This all boils down to the contract, really. If the contract states that you do not own the heated seats, you have to pay for them. You can't skip reading the contract and say that you own the entire car now.
Not saying that BMW is in the right. Hell yeah they are extracting every penny they can, but you can simply protest by not buying from them. People support their decisions by buying their products and complain afterwards. There are many alternatives.
> Well, when you buy a car your payment gives you ownership of the entire car.
Sure.
> If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
If you were talking about a vacuum cleaner or something, I'd agree. But modern cars are "fly by wire". It is not, in fact, only the customer's business if they modify their car's software.
I think the problem here is that courts have allowed software vendors to use a legal trick to get around how owning things normally works. Software gets copied into memory to run, and courts have accepted the theory that making such a copy requires a license even though it's not a copy in the traditional sense (it can't be given to a third party so that they can also use it).
A book is copyrighted too, but when I buy one, I can legally write in it, paste in pages of my own, cut out pages, etc.... I can even sell it after I've done that.
I'm 95% certain the law should be changed to restore the first sale concept to software, and even more certain when it comes to embedded software that's necessary to use hardware owned by end-users.
> The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats. The manufacturer included them anyway, but disabled them in software.
Sure they did. Maybe they didn't pay the full price for those heated seats, but they definitely paid more for the car with them (but disabled) than for a car without them entirely.
The carmaker is hoping that people will pay for the unlock in order to recoup their costs. But they're certainly not going to ship those heated seats in every car without inflating the cost of the base vehicle by some amount.
Put another way, it might look like this:
1. Car without heated seats at all: $10,000
2. Car with heated seats, but locked: $10,100
3. Car with heated seats, unlocked: $10,500
If the carmaker offered options 1 & 3, then customers would pay for what they want and get, and nothing more. If carmakers only offer option 2, then even customers who don't ever want heated seats will still pay some premium.
The carmaker might estimate that only 50% of their customers will pay an unlock fee for a car sold to them. They want to still cover their costs and make a tidy profit, so they might charge more than the $400 difference to unlock the feature. And that's if they're doing it in the non-shady way, and are charging a one-time fee. If they decide to charge a subscription, they might do something like charge $100/year for it, and then eventually they're just making pure profit for no added value.
Also consider that the carmaker's own costs could be, on average, greater per car if they have to offer two different options 1 & 3. Offering only option 2 (regardless of whether or not people are able to defeat the software lock) might be cheaper for them. I don't see why we need to subsidize their business decisions.
But all of this is still kinda irrelevant: bottom line is that if you sell piece of hardware to a customer, that hardware now belongs to the customer, and you don't get to tell the customer what they can and can't do with it.
Money is fungible so it is really hard to say but it is entirely possible that the base model doesn't pay anything for the seats. They could sell the car with $10,000 and expect that 1/2 of the customers pay $500 for the upgrade. Those customers are essentially paying to install the seat hardware in all cars (because it is cheaper than them paying for a new production line that makes 1/2 the number of cars). So in 2 the purchaser of that car still pays $10k and their "other half" who statistically bought the heated seats paid for the $100 cost in their car.
You can also picture this as a marketing cost. Maybe Tesla things that a $100/car marketing cost is worth paying because they expect that 1/2 of the cars will pay $500 so they have $150 expected return.
it reminds me of those hardware hacks to unlock processors [0]
the upside is that by not having much difference between SKUs, and "locking" one SKU from becoming the other, the costs are lower, and manufacturers might turn those savings into lower prices
in both cases, as in cell phones, I believe like you still own the hardware, including everything in it, including software [1], so if you want to "unlock it", that's your right, as is smashing it, reflashing it, and having sex with it. If that makes for an unsustainable business model, nobody is entitled to their preferred business model being sustainable. Analogous examples here might be unofficial Keurig pods, or printer ink cartridges, which bypass manufacturer DRM intending to lock customers into an otherwise arguably unsustainable business model.
sometimes, though, you have to fight for your rights, e.g. build/buy/download and use unofficial tools
[1]: this inclusion stems from my belief that, where possible, you have an absolute right to view every bit of data that happens across hardware you own, whether gadgetry or eyeballs, in any format you desire, as well as the right to remember what you've viewed, as well as the right to modify or prevent modification of any arbitrary bit on said hardware
I've always been curious if the ongoing fees for BMW end up covering repairs if the hardware covering the function breaks. It would seem absolutely insane if not, yet I am pretty sure the answer is not.
I usually lean towards consumer rights on this type of thing, and the idea of paying a subscription for something like heated seats is annoying to me.
That said I am trying to play devil's advocate here. Other people have mentioned the analogy of locking out some CPUs on a die for a cheaper version of hardware, and I think that kind of applies here, at least for a one time payment.
If I'm willing to accept that, is it so unreasonable that they could rent this feature to me, even if it's only a software switch? After all, the idea of renting physical property isn't very controversial.
Again, I don't like the idea and would never want to rent the heated seats software switch, but I'm having a hard time justifying why it shouldn't be allowed.
I feel different about extra cores on a CPU than I do about heated seats.
The manufacturing price delta between an 8 core CPU and a 16 core, nowadays is functionally meaningless.
The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.
The way I see it, for things like heated seats or CarPlay, I'm already paying for the base hardware cost (plus some margin) as part of the base price of the car, charging me for the upgrade is charging me a markup on what I already paid for. Making it a service is insult to injury.
> The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.
Citation needed. The way assembly lines and product mix work, it could be meaningfully less expensive to have all the hardware be identical with software unlocks.
> The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful
I don't believe that is the case. BMW determined it was more expensive to have the supply chain, inventory, and manufacturing management to build both heated and non-heated versions of their seats. Rather than just make heated seats a standard feature they saw an opportunity to maintain and even expand their highest margin revenue stream: options.
Also keep in mind that heated seats may not be the only option available. If you add in a few other options like backup camera, self driving/driver assist and maybe a few more you end up making a dozen or so different production lines and complex logistics. If you have a dozen features you are basically making custom cars at this point. It can definitely be cheaper to make a single model of car and lock features instead of dealing with all of that complexity. Sure, for one commonly purchased feature like heated seats it make make sense to have 2 production lines (at least for the seats) once you start adding dimensions to that matrix it gets expensive very quickly.
I believe that the worst thing is the use of natural resources to produce those things without any function whatsoever. Assuming the majority of customers don't pay extra, it just makes it worse.
>The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.
You could probably buy something that would heat your seat at home for under $4 on Temu. And that includes multiple middle companies and shipping across the ocean. It probably costs them pennies, where the upside is, this owner doesn't want heated seats, but a car can easily have 2-3 owners in its first 10 years. maybe the 2nd and 3rd owners will want the heated seats, worth the money it would take to install it
I would also add that those sorts of subscriptions shouldn't have a lock-in period, at least not more than a month.
And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats?
Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.