Welcome to real hell. For most of us, owning a BMW would be an ambitious thing: the carmaker's latest model will set you back just under $95,000 / £80,000. It's not a stupid change. Now imagine if you had cut and saved to afford such an expensive item, and when you drove it, the thing started cheating on you like the worst kind of F2P mobile game.
BMW's cars are high-end items, you could describe it as a luxury car maker, and the company has been interested in how microtransactions could fit in there for a while. It's had some false starts along the way: In 2019, BMW offered a subscription service for Apple CarPlay in the US, which lets you integrate your phone with the vehicle's screens and audio system, for $80 a year. The response was so negative that it quickly turned around and made the feature a standard inclusion in most of its cars.
That doesn't mean it's given up, though, and now it's trying another offer in South Korea: paying to heat your seats. This costs about $18 a month (thanks, The Verge (opens in new tab)), or you can choose to pay for "unlimited" access for a one-time payment of $415.
The latter option makes this more reasonable: after all, the ticket price of a car never includes the 'extras' that belong to the upsell. The difference maker here is that BMW's cars are all perfectly capable of things like (deep breath) Active Cruise Control, Adaptive M Suspension, Apple CarPlay or BMW Drive Recording. Only now you have to pay for the software to unlock these features built into the car you already bought.
Where exactly this happens, outside of South Korea where it was launched, remains to be seen. The BMW UK shop, for example, lists some of what BMW calls 'DriveConnected' features including front seat heating (£15/month), steering wheel heating (£10/month) or the privilege of paying to get the on-board GPS map updated with new information. The automaker doesn't seem to be trying to introduce this in the US just yet, which is likely a hangover from the Apple CarPlay debacle, but don't be under any illusions that it will.
The bigger argument here is whether companies should be able to sell products with artificial locks. Any BMW car for which these features can be purchased already has the hardware functionality: it just needs to be enabled by BMW software. BMW itself notes when describing some of these features that "the hardware for this feature is already installed in your vehicle during production, at no extra cost".
And a BMW is primarily something with a huge ticket price. Watch the video below and tell me this isn't a dystopia.
Maybe that's the trick. The kind of people who buy new BMWs shouldn't be batting an eyelid for a few thousand extra pounds to unlock various features, and that's the automaker's gamble. But if there's one thing that's certain about microtransactions like these, it's that they devalue the feel of a particular product. BMW should be an ambitious brand, something people dream about. But who really wants a car with a car dealer built in.
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