BMW Adaptive Suspension Can Be Added via Subscription. Suspension As A Service (SAAS)

Oh look, another reason not to buy BMW, I'll just add it to the other 456788656752 reasons.

If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.

Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they'll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they'll all follow.

We are pirating car suspension now holy shit

Next up, Anti-lock brakes as a Subscription Service. ASS.

Well done BMW. Anything that leads to more people cycling instead of driving is a good thing in my book.

In theory most subscription services provide additional content as time goes on. This only provides a capability that already exists on the car.

Got it, don't buy cars built after 2010.

These cars already cost more than my life, how can they ask for more money.

"The pressure eased off a little when they ended subscriptions tied to heated seats, but the Internet rage machine has come back for vengeance."

lol. It's not vengeance or rage, its simply the fact that making someone pay for something they already own is dumb.

You know it's just a matter of time before this shit starts being applied to budget cars.

...I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage.

FUCK these out of control capitalists jesus christ.

Why is this bad in a nutshell.

A) The only way to control access to this feature is to lock down and phone home. If it doesn't phone home then when someone figures out a way around your present security its possible for someone to sell said features forever. Such DRM could hurt repeatability by accident or more likely on purpose.

B) There is no reason to fail open so even if BMW is still chugging when they stop taking your cars phone calls and retires those servers you get no more feature.

C) The amount spent over the lifespan of a car wherein people opt to take care of their valuable asset absolutely dwarfs the cost able to be extracted up front

D) This functionality opens the door to a hacker not just turning off your features but turning off your car. This includes state sponsored attackers and people who are just generally pissed off at the geopolitical actions of your country of origin. If you are in the US that is a lot of fucking people.

E) Product segmentation on average increases the amount you can extract per user. Allowing segmentation by features turn on or off in software by the month it allows far greater segmentation with no reasonable expectation that the baseline will be lower. This means the lowest end user of a model pays the same for even less. The median user pays somewhat more and the max user pays a LOT more.

F) This means wholly paid for used cars now come with a car payment to the manufacturer.

Now there are half a hundred people on the boards of these companies and 338M of us in the US. 449M in the EU. There is no reason to allow this misfeature to continue to be a thing in our markets. If automakers don't like those restrictions any one of them can opt to most of the most valuable markets in the world and find their fortunes exclusively in China while their competitors eat their former marketshare.

In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.

Otherwise, you're just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?

What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they're regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all....

“We’re pivoting from serving peasants to fleecing rich dumbasses that subscribe and pay monthly fees for features built into the car.”

And they’ll make money doing it. Because there will never be a shortage of people with more money than sense.

When you need fitgirl to help you with your car.

They tried this with heated seats and no one wanted it, what made them think would we accept this?

German car makers have become such a joke in the last decade...

They would make turn signals a subscription service but they won't ever get any money from that.

This is why I don't mourn Western car companies getting slaughtered by Chinese EVs. They can't really provide value by nickel and diming customers with subscriptions for components already installed on their privacy-invading overpriced cars.

I'd hoped that BMW (and the rest of the automotive industry) would have learned from the subscription heated seats debacle.

Oh well, no Beemers for me.

Should be a nottheonion article

I’m never buying a BMW again. I had an electric i3 which had an inverter (charger) failure. BMW wanted €12k to fix it. Thankfully an independent offered to do it for 4K. But BMW still wanted 3K just to plug it in and authenticate the new block. Nothing else, just “bless” it. Made the fix cost-prohibitive so we just had to scrap the car. The battery, which most people fear, was fine on this 8 year old car.

Imagine suffering an accident and having to pay a plus because of a feature you can't even use on the parts you replace. I feel this is non-competitive bullshit that is following the trend Elon Musk started, although it probably started much earlier.

We need a FOSS car....

So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service....

It's time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all encryption key pairs used in the product they purchased.

(For you who don't know what encryption key pairs are used for: they are used for the software to know that a change order, like "activate suspension", is legit and therefore will be executed.)

Thanks, I gladly stick with my old non-BMW car!

So, you buy a car with all these features, but you don't pay for them. They are disabled by default. You jailbreak your car, everything works without paying extra, but then you realize, you broke your warranty.

Man, never thought I'd see the day that after market car crackz become an industry.

Hardware As A Service (HAAS).

BMW is always making headlines with this crap, are there any other brands doing this shit? I know Hyundai IONIQ has a free trial for you to be able to unlock your car and whatnot with an app, later they will do it subscription based.

What ever happened to you buy a car and that’s it. No need for subscriptions to things like suspensions, steering wheels, running engines…. You know the things I bought.

And what happens when all the cars are like this? EAAS? (Enshittification As A Service)

I wish that someone sues when something breaks in the car that you didn't opt in for.

And... yet better, they get sued when something breaks that is in connection with a paid service and someone suspects that it's because they paid part caused it.

I can easily foresee the drm services or servers being shutdown, like the Microsoft music server....most you bought can no longer be used if moved.

Eventually they will "retire" this model and shut down servers. Making the car maybe driveable, but won't have stuff you paid for I bet.

Plus, eventually someone will unlock this with a hacked car software patch anyway.

We start again with a strange Germany in Europe:)

Germany; don't do this please...

If I own the car it's my hardware to use. If I don't own that suspension then someone needs to collect their property from my car.

So, the car gets very expensive suspension, but to use the features you need a subscription? So if I don't want the active suspension feature, I am still stuck with the very expensive active suspension hardware...

Yeah, no, I'll stick with Subaru. Everything they make uses tech from the dinosaur age of motoring.

Automatic headlight dimming, only €82 per year.

Lol, good luck with that. I'll stuck with my dumb, subscription-less and app-less ebike. And still manage to beat cars due to insane traffic.

I actually think this is a great idea. Hear me out.

They fit the hardware that you can't touch while the Motor plan is active, but when the right to repair legislation kicks in, and we start debating whether we actually own the cars we buy, all these scumbag practices will mean that any car outside of the Motorplan should be able to run cracked OS's and everyone gets free BMW features on their cars after motorplan expires.

I vote they keep going for a bit, then they get their asses handed to them with out of maintenance plan service options and 3rd party features.

There are basic rules for coming up with these types of product subscriptions:

1. Is it something a large number of customers can't live without?
2. Is it something that costs money to support and continue developing? Subscriptions help defray that cost and loyal users are happy to keep it going.
3. Will the feature be actively used on a regular basis, going forward?

Now apply these to seat warmers, suspension adjustments, self-driving, or whatever else shows up in the future. If you don't hit all three, head back to the drawing board.

P.S.: This isn't limited to cars. It's equally true for any hardware product.

People act like subscriptions are a new thing for cars, and somehow mentally gloss over the fact that they have to physically go in to renew their energy subscription weekly, not to mention the quarterly, and bi-annual subscriptions for oil and various maintenance respectively.

Everything has always been a subscription, you're just a frog that's well done.

Don't get me started on your road subscription.

When I said I wanted Forza in the car this isn't exactly what I was gaming for.

If I were a BMW customer, I'd be suspending my purchase of their rip-off vehicles.

Bmw slowly becoming a really bad car

Now, I can "kinda" see the rationale behind optional features on a car being either enabled via software or subscription. I believe the permanent enable price should be the same as if you added the hardware to the car as an option.

As to why this might make sense for a carmaker. In my work I've visited car manufacturers before, and from what I could see it's quite expensive and adds time to support the various options when building a car. You see they have the main production line, and units are pulled off the main line to fit the options at various points and then reinserted and this causes problems for efficiency and price per unit I think.

So, there's probably a cost saving to making the base car have all the options fitted and having a completely standardized production line. However, the expense is likely going to mean if they sold the base car at the usual base car price they would either lose money, or at the very least, the profit margin wouldn't be worthwhile.

However, if you know a certain percentage of people will want the options, and you can enable it with software later, it's possible building the hardware into every car as standard would work out overall cheaper. They might also be able to upsell to more people by making a subscription option, perhaps with maybe a free trial for the first say 3 months of ownership. That is, they turn everything on for 6 months for free, then revert you to the package you paid for. Hoping that you liked some of the features and will pay or subscribe to keep them.

What I don't like is when this stuff might become ONLY available as a subscription, the overall move toward subscription models for everything irks me a lot. I'd much prefer we still get to choose a package, and have the ability to upgrade later.

So I think my point is, the argument "the hardware is there anyway" doesn't really work, because they are likely going to install the hardware at a loss, on the assumption (backed up by their own numbers) they will sell enough to make a bigger profit overall.

They also likely bake into the numbers that a very small number of people will hack the car and enable the features anyway. The vast majority will not do this, though.

I do love german cars, but now they just trolling. Not that I can afford a BMW, but would place a third mortgage on my house if only it wasn’t for the subscription. What next “subscription on your breaks has expired. Do you want AI to take it from here? Please download our app”

Yeah nah. I hope these car company keep adding subscriptions, it'll hopefully push people over the edge and hurt their sales. These cars are becoming unfix-able. I can't imagine how much it would cost to get this system fixed.

TPB go brrrrrrrrrr

So you just go to a crack website and search for the suspension crack. A few months later while riding a very smooth ride over a thousand dinosaur corpses, your computer tells the car to steer to the right abruptly in the 75mph freeway.