Rewind a few years, and this very writer was sitting in a stylishly furnished conference hall in Munich, listening to BMW executives talk about how it planned to offer subscription services that would unlock “upgrades" in customer’s cars.
Often dubbed “microtransactions” in the multimedia world, these subscription packages would allow BMW owners to download over-the-air software upgrades to unlock things like Remote Engine Start via a smartphone, or the ability to turn parking cameras into a dash cam with a BMW Drive Recorder mode.
It might come as no surprise then that BMW has now pulled a U-turn on the decision to charge customers to activate hardware functionality.
Speaking to Autocar, BMW’s board member for sales and marketing, Pieter Nota, said: "We 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.
"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.
"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.”
The package costs users in the US $100 a month to effectively increase power by 45kW to 65kW, depending on the model.
