Thread: BMW to charge a monthly fee to activate certain features?

Originally Posted by p38arover

John Cadogen just did a video on this.

There's a man who should have his Youtube licence revoked.

Why?

Dude has a some sort of superiority fantasy/complex, comes across like.......

"If you don't agree with me then you are wrong and should be eradicated from the gene pool."
"Let me give you your opinion."

Hence I don't watch his tripe.

I disagree with you.

I'm really surprised BMW are allowed to get away with it, surely a law suit or two coming soon.

The BMW 'user pays' model seems OK to me ... if only the users really do pay their fair share.

ie. There are a group who paid up front for the extra thing (in this case heated seats), and there are a group who didn't.

There is a total cost to BMW - every car actually has the hardware - same total cost of production if you like.

Rather than all BMW purchasers paying a share of that total cost, regardless of use, those that want the extra thing pay their share of the additional cost of the extra thing in all the cars (including the marginal extra cost of putting the same hardware in the cars that never use it assuming there is one).

Those that want to 'buy in' later, also become part of the group sharing the additional cost.

Those that didn't want it, are hopefully not sharing the cost. They might have the capable hardware, but they hopefully didn't pay anything for it ie. they only pay what the cost would have been to put non-heated seats in every car.

If this is the case, then it's the 'heated seats crowd' who should be mad about it, as they not only paid for their own heated seats, but for additional costs of heated seats going unused in base models.

However the pricing of heated seats is unlikely to be based on a fair distribution of the overall costs of production. I'm no economist, but pricing is probably based on price elasticity of demand. Only BMW would have any idea of who's paying a fair share relative to the cost of production.

I would never pay for heated seats if it could be avoided. I did however use them in my partners Subaru Forrester a few days back, and for 2 mins it was nice. I hope they were not too expensive.

When the news first came out, it was intimated that BMW took the feature away and then tried to get people to pay to get it back. I don't think that's true. So if it's based on getting a feature that you don't have, I don't think it's unreasonable.

Originally Posted by akovach

When the news first came out, it was intimated that BMW took the feature away and then tried to get people to pay to get it back. I don't think that's true. So if it's based on getting a feature that you don't have, I don't think it's unreasonable.

Yes, this is how I understand it too (my wife has a BMW, lucky she already has the feature, it's probably her absolute most favourite thing about the car)