Car Feature Subscriptions

Many car manufacturers have found that it is cheaper to ship all vehicles with a feature, and then have the owner pay to unlock it.https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21311332/bmw-in-car-purcha...

Not really the same thing, but Tesla does it on a 10x scale: The monthly cost of the FSD Subscription is $200/mo, costing $14400 if you were to pay for it over the entire 72 month loan, but you can also choose to buy it outright for $15k ( $16800 over the loan term at a 2% interest rate; at current interest rates of 7%, $21300) - and for FSD, you can cancel anytime to save money if you don't want it. With the loan, you can't get a rebate for removing the feature.Of course, for

Paying for features to be unlocked is not new, especially in IT, but with a car it just feels wrong somehow. The hardware is there, but not in a sense when you buy a PC without an OS, because that's a multi-purpose machine, you give it context. Heated seats are dedicated hardware, they're there for one purpose only, they're already in your car and you already paid for the expense of making them and continue paying for gas to haul those heavy hunkers around, increasing emissions. M

This is a thing at least https://driving.ca/bmw/auto-news/news/bmw-to-make-owners-pay...

it doesnt work exactly like that.when you buy a car, you can either pay full price for a feature, lets say heated seats for $4000, or you can purchase subscription for $80/mo, or you may opt out of that feature, save money and it will be disabled programmatically in your car. Just as if car was never supplied with heating element for seats.yet your car will still be shipped with heated seats - just because it is cheaper to do that for manufacturing purposes. Cheaper to equip all cars

Their explanation sounds pretty plausible, even if they're using it to cover up the actual intent. Hopefully get get rid of this stupid idea once and for all.BMW did something similar recently. A few years ago, they announced a plan to make Apple CarPlay a subscription service, then walked it back. And now it sounds like they've made plans for similar options (like heated seats) to be a subscription service.[1]Not like I have any room to talk, I suppose, since I paid for an OTA f

This is nothing new. Many car manufacturers have premium features already built in to the car but disabled in the software (because its cheaper to build fewer variants). Volkswagen charges a premium for remote window control despite all cars being manufactured to support the feature.

yeah, but the extra features don't cost extra money for the manufacturer. For example, BMW sells a subscription for heated seats. But... EVERY BMW has the hardwere in place, seat heaters and everything installed on the car, even if you don't have the subscription. it's not some cost savings passed on to you, it's cheaper for them to put seat heaters in every car!!! They're just going to charge you more to unlock it. Hence, subscription services are not value added, t

And I don't support this at all. These cars cost an absolute fortune(Model 3 is worth like 4 years of average salary where I'm from) and the thought that it could be delivered with some hardware that isn't functional purely because you haven't paid extra for the switch is mindboggling.You could make the same argument about houses - imagine how much cheaper it would be if every house was built out of prefabricates, but you just had to pay extra to get the additional rooms!

If you're purchasing the "not pro" version for a much cheaper cost, and it is a functional program (basic things like Save not locked behind the paywall), having different tiers of paid features is fine. You were able to pick to have the lower tier features, even if you end up downloading the same exact files.When it comes to hardware, if they've already installed the feature, they've already factored the cost of it into the purchase price. Your out the door cost incl