BMW has confirmed that it will grow the number of vehicle services and functions it offers through subscriptions but that it will stop charging owners to use hardware features their vehicles already have. Like heated seats, for example.
It was back in mid-2022 when BMW sent much of the automotive community into a fury after it started to sell heated seats as a subscription. This came despite the fact that vehicles were already equipped with all the hardware for seat heating. As you can imagine, owners were not happy that even though their new vehicles came with heated seats, they would have to pay a subscription to unlock them.
While recently speaking with Autocar, BMW board member for sales and marketing Pieter Nota said that customers have not responded well to the launch of subscription services for features they expect to be standard.
Read: BMW Starts Charging South Korean Customers $18 A Month For Heated Seats
“What we don’t do anymore – and that is a very well-known example – is offer seat heating by this way,” he said. “It’s either in or out. We offer it by the factory and you either have it or you don’t have it. We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate that later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high. People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that.”
Despite the incredibly poor reception to paying a subscription for heated seats, BMW is doubling down with paid-for on-demand services, in particular software and service-related products.
“We actually 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,” Nota revealed. “What we find is software-based services, like downloading a parking assist product, is very well accepted. People know it’s a certain piece of software they can download that costs money. It’s the same as downloading a film or an extra feature on an app. That is accepted and we do that increasingly successfully.”
