It’s now possible for BMW owners to enjoy an indulgent feature without having to pay an outrageous monthly fee. After customers complained about being charged extra to unlock functions already available in their vehicles, BMW has discontinued its plans for an $ 18-a-month subscription to enable heated seats in its cars. A recent Autocar interview with Pieter Nota, BMW board member for sales and marketing, at the IAA Mobility conference in Munich confirmed the change. Nota said the heated seat subscription was part of BMW’s widespread microtransaction efforts but wasn’t well received. “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,” Nota told Autocar. “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.”
As soon as the feature began appearing in BMW’s digital stores in various countries, many people realized that the company was trying to lock its heated seats behind a paywall. The price of a monthly subscription to heat a car’s front seats varied by region, with options for a year for $180, a three-year subscription for $300, or “unlimited” access for $415 being available. A heated steering wheel and seats will still be a bit more expensive, but they will likely only be available as a standalone package at the dealership for customers. As a BMW spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, the heated seat subscription was never available in the US, but it was offered in countries like the UK, Germany, New Zealand, South Korea, and South Africa through BMW’s digital stores. Heated steering wheel subscriptions were also removed from the company’s ConnectedDrive store, the spokesperson added.
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It wasn’t the first time that BMW tried subscriptions but failed to sell. According to The Verge, the company intended to charge a one-time fee of $300 for customers who wanted to use Apple’s CarPlay in their cars, followed by an $80 annual fee for customers who wanted to use the product. CarPlay and Android Auto are both free of charge with the vast majority of car companies. There were also attempts by BMW to make the entire car a subscription, launching a service called Access by BMW, in which customers would have to pay around $2,000 a month to be granted access to a select range of BMW cars. BMW eventually discontinued both Access by BMW and CarPlay subscriptions. Still, subscriptions are gaining traction in the automotive sector as companies explore new offerings involving yearly or monthly fees, intrigued by the possibility of over-the-air software updates to open up new revenue streams.
