Hackers Already Prepared To Screw Up BMW’s Subscription Heated Seat Model
from the you-no-longer-own-the-things-you-buy dept
Earlier this month BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable technology that already exists in the car and consumers already paid for.
The move portends a rather idiotic and expensive future for consumers, and hackers and tinkerers aren’t having it. Grey market hackers have already been fiddling with BMW systems for years, providing users greater control over things they already own. And they’re more than ready to begin meeting customer demand for a way to bypass BMW’s dumb, greedy idea:
“We’re always listening to our customers and finding ways to offer the features they’re looking for. As long as BMW makes it possible to activate heated seats, we can look at offering it. If BMW doesn’t allow it, then the same feature could be added with a hardware retrofit, so in the end the driver is always going to be able to get what they want,” Paul Smith, content marketing specialist at Bimmer Tech, a BMW coding firm, told Motherboard in an email.
BMW has a history of claiming that any kind of tinkering invalidates a user’s warranty. Since the seat heating tech already exists in the car that users have paid for, claims that enabling it violates warranties could result in BMW running afoul of the FTC’s new crackdown on right to repair violations.
For its part, BMW continues to double down on the delusion that charging people extra (in perpetuity) for something they already own and paid for is somehow a wonderful value equation:
“The ConnectedDrive Store in the UK offers customers the opportunity to add selected features which they did not order when the vehicle was built … This functionality is particularly useful for secondary owners, as they now have the opportunity to add features which the original owner did not choose … Drivers can also experiment with a feature by activating a short-term trial before committing to a full purchase.”
The heated seat subscription option is part of the company’s “Connected Drive” program, and is already reality in Korea, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, and South Africa. It hasn’t come to the U.S. yet, and the recent backlash likely has the company rethinking that expansion.
Filed Under: auto, freedom to tinker, heated seats, right to repair, subscription service, warranty
Companies: bmw
Comments on “Hackers Already Prepared To Screw Up BMW’s Subscription Heated Seat Model”
Pay X to have feature, pay more to use it
“The ConnectedDrive Store in the UK offers customers the opportunity to add selected features which they did not order when the vehicle was built …
Left unsaid of course is that whether the buyer ordered the feature they have in fact already paid for it since it’s tied to hardware that’s built into the vehicle from the outset, the ability to use it is just being kept from them until they pay more for it.
There’s a big difference between paying for something you don’t already have that needs to be provided to you and paying for something you do have but that’s been deliberately crippled such that it’s useless until it’s been ‘unlocked’. One of those is providing a service that can be worth the money, the other’s just a scam where the seller offers a broken product and charges you extra to ‘fix’ it.
Damage already done?
The damage is already done. And I’d like to believe that a lot of people will now consider BMW as a tainted brand from now on. (It certainly is with me)
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This is completely Tesla’s fault. They started this trend by deactivating features on second-hand cars.
Is it any wonder other companies didn’t notice?
I am with Ben; I do not want to deal with companies that play these sorts of games. To date that is Tesla, Ford, Toyota, and BMW.
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One would think double dipping off of an item being resold should be a problem.
Its like the insanity of them forcing people who buy art to pay a portion of the sale price to the painter every time it changes hands.
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One would think double dipping off of an item being resold should be a problem.
TBH, car manufacturers are only following the example set by satellite and cable companies in showing adverts on channels paid for with fees. Having said that, their actions are no less immoral.
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What cable company does that? To my knowledge, they generally just pass on whatever signal they’ve received, with whatever ads it contained.
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Block Communications is one such company in the US, and then there’s Virgin Media in the UK. Also in the UK on the satellite side, there’s Sky Plc. If you want to know about other companies, you’ll have to put in your fair share of the research.
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That seems like some channels and one or more cable companies with common ownership. I’m sure we could also find cable companies inserting ads into their TV guide and community access channels too. But I’m not sure things like these are what was meant. AFAIK, most of the popular channels are over-the-air networks and cable operators do not insert ads into them. While, now, there’s sometimes common ownership, that wasn’t the case decades ago when people started complaining about “I’m paying but there are ads.” Newspapers and magazines would be a better example.
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And yet someone else handwaves nine minute ad breaks on channels that are entirely financed by fees. Are you a shill of a satellite broadcaster or a cable company?
As I pointed out in the comments section under the previous article about this, BMW’s actions are equivalent to a landlord charging extra on top of your rent and gas bill just to turn on your boiler in cold weather. Is it any wonder that grey hat hackers are willing to help for far less than BMW would charge? In this scenario, in fact, I would even elevate them to the level of white hat hackers.
Price
I hadn’t heard anything about that. The price for the vehicles is now lower than it was before this nonsense?
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Only a fool would think the cost of the seat heating hardware isn’t built into the purchase price. The subscription fee is just the owner paying again.
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Exactly. Just like my rental covers the presence of the boiler in my flat and the gas payments cover the fuel that it runs on, so I shouldn’t have to pay anything else just to turn it on when I need to.
Accounting RE: Price
Under GAAP, BMW has accounted for the cost of the hardware in the car as they would any feature, and they have priced the car accordingly, as their profit is impacted by the cost of this hardware the same as if the feature was simply always on.
The price is the same as (if they were a standard feature) or more than it would have been before the change to a subscription feature.
I would bet that the price is higher
Price is likely to be higher because they also have to recover the future cost of administering the subscription system. not to mention amortizing the development cost of whatever control system that makes the car inoperable if the seats are hacked. (And I bet makes it inoperable if the heater fails, as well!)
And here comes the Magnuson-Moss act to the rescue! Not to thwart the subscription model, but to derail any warranty-is-void issues. And that’s the real issue, whereby BMW is banking on users won’t lawyer up for fear of their warranties going south, by way of (sales) contractual obligations. Those (few) of us in the know, know that the above cited act prevents any such shenanigans.
BTW, speaking of no one in particular…. how in Hell did Tesla ever get away with remotely controlling a car they sold, not rented, to a customer? That should be investigated to the maximum. If legit companies like Bimmer (quoted in TFS) can help consumers bypass and forestall remote control for a BMW, then I should think that either they, or someone else of like bent, will be along shortly to pry Elon’s warped little greedy fingers off of their privately owned vehicles. The question is, why hasn’t that happened already???
Nah, they’ll just lobby the FTC to change the rules so that people can’t use the “right to repair” to circumvent something you normally have to pay for. The only thing that would make this idea even more idiotic is if they took a page out of the MPA’s playbook: “You wouldn’t steal a car…….’s heated seats!”
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I would totally download car-seat heaters… if I had a passenger that wants them[1].
[1] I personally have tried heated seat, and just found them weird/annoying.
Wrong on So Many Levels
Imagine a future where car manufacturers automatically make cars with ALL TEH FEATURES. And then you pay a subscription to enable seat warmers, air conditioning, that infotainment system, cupholders … All that is terrible in and of itself.
What I’m getting at here is that all of those extras add weight to the car. And if I opt not to subscribe to any of it, I still have to drag that weight around. Do I get to charge the manufacturer a monthly fee for all the extra gas I’m burning?
And another thing, what if something you’re not using fails spectacularly in such a way it damages the car. Imagine how pissed off you’ll be when you have to pay thousands of dollars to repair an A/C system you’ve never used.
See also: Tesla
Today there’s a Twitter thread about Tesla “fixing a configuration mistake” in someone’s car. By sending an over-the-air update, without permission, to limit the battery capacity:
It’s known that Tesla have been software-limiting their batteries for years—whenever there’s a hurricane on the way, they’ll use a software update to increase the range of existing cars in that area. But that means people are lugging around unusable battery mass the rest of the time.
We still live in a democracy…for now.
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We still live in a democracy…for now.
If you’re an American I’d question that. Seems more like an oligarchy to me, specifically a corporate captured one.
Just watching the BBC series Big Oil-v-The World: link
It points the finger right where it needs to be, Fourth Circle of Hell awaits those evildoers…
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The terms “democracy” and “oligarchy” aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.
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The terms “democracy” and “oligarchy” aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.
Sure, of course. Logic abides.
But I maintain the USA is not currently existing under a functioning democracy in any sense of the word.
My link to the BBC series was to highlight just how far corporations in the USA [and globally] had invested themselves into perverting the data and corresponding messaging concerning climate change. Seemed relevant to the OP posting about corporate capture concerning tech we as consumers had purchased.
Hard wired option?
If the heater is already there, I wonder how hard it would be to bypass the computer and just had a hard wired switch?
BMW should be on the hot seat for this one.
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Not unless they pay the $18 a month subscription fee.
This isn’t new for BMW. I’m pretty sure their turn signals have been on a similar model for decades, and most drivers are too cheap to pay for that service.
Re: another possible explanation
Not so sure about that. I think that turn signals are illegal in NJ, and the vendor may simply be assuring compliance.