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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

BMW is selling this as a great solution to fleet cars - say your company buys 100 cars for your employees - this way everyone gets a "base" spec car at a low cost to the company, but if an employee wants a sport mode or adaptive cruise control they can just pay to unlock it from their own pocket.

Like, it makes sense to a lot of people. BMW loves this, corporate fleets love this. But as it slowly becomes standard we all lose.

Also, Tesla sold exactly this for a while(don't know if they still do) to hit their $35k promise of a Model 3 - the car had heated seats installed, but you had to pay a one time $1000 fee to Tesla to unlock them.

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I see two futures here.

Future 1:

I'm working for a company and I buy the heated seats upgrade.

Eight months later I'm looking at moving to another company and I'll lose that value. Maybe that affects my decision.

So I'm paying for my own employer-lock-in loyalty perks? Am I a moron? No, so I negotiate away part of my salary, or my healthcare, to have the nicer car.

Future 2:

You get heated seats on certain luxury car brands as long as you have an American Express platinum. Just like airport lounge access.

I'd bet on Future 2.

They're both dystopian.

I mean, it will be like everything else - companies which really want to spoil their employees and who buy BMWs as fleet cars, will order them with every subscription option covered and just eat the cost. So the CEO doesn't have to worry about his 7-series not having heated seats.

But I can also totally see situations where if the choice is between say....a Ford Mondeo or a BMW 3-series, the company can go "you can get the BMW, but we're not paying anything for options - if you want them, that's on you".

>>Eight months later I'm looking at moving to another company and I'll lose that value. Maybe that affects my decision.

If it's a subscription, then that value is lost anyway. You can probably get a partial refund for the unused months before you return the car.

Agreed about C-level execs, of course.

Another poster said it's a $300 one-time payment. So you're losing that when you leave. Figure on a bunch of options and it's a lot of money.

I'd want it tied to me, not the vehicle. I paid for heated seats on my last BMW. You're charging me again? For DLC?

If I could pay for heated seats forever I could see it. It's just software, you're putting the same seats in every car, now we have a value.

So of course that will never happen.

Paying a one time unlock fee and paying a subscription on a hardware feature are vastly different things. You might still disagree with both, but they are different.

Heated seats are a pretty standard upgrade that people will pay for, so I'm not sure that it makes much difference whether it's a physical upgrade or a software unlock, and there are valid reasons Tesla might choose a software unlock.

But charging a subscription fee on heated seats on a non-rental car is outrageous.

It's not necessarily as different as it seems. When you buy a second hand Tesla from Tesla it can happen that a feature that the previous owner had has been disabled. Tesla has in fact been accused of disabling features of cars that were not sold through them.

Does the 1000 USD upgrade buy the feature or merely enable it for the time that the owner owns the car?

Charging a new owner to unlock the feature again is slightly different than charging the original owner a subscription.

However, I still see selling features as a software upgrade strictly as an alternative means* of selling upgrades. So the upgrade should be tied to the car, not the owner. The added bonus here would be that a second owner could unlock features that the initial owner didn't want.

*i.e. Tesla might decide it's better just to put the heated seats in all cars rather than manufacturing cars with and without.

It’s actually $300 one time payment.

Tesla has done that kind of things a number of times. In earlier Model S versions, you could get a software locked battery for less money. You could then pay to unlock the capacity.

On the current Model 3 SR+, the rear seats are not heated, but you can pay to have the software unlock them. Its a few hundred dollars, I think.

For both the Model 3 LR and the Y LR, there is an available one time $2k USD upgrade to provide enhanced acceleration.

And obviously, the "FSD" package is a software fee that generally requires no hardware changes. It does get you access to some new hardware, though if needed.

But I think people see this differently if it is a one time fee vs a subscription fee.

This is complete bullshit, it started as a normal feature. My 2009 328i has heated seats I've never once had to pay to activate.

No one in a fleet vehicle pays for their own 'upgrades', man.

DLC on cars and people are here defending it, I lost my shit over games doing it. We went from pay once for the game, maybe another expansion thay doubled your vanilla game. Now every company nickles and dimes us to death. Does no one remember banks being shit on for that in the 80s-90s?

Wait, which part of it is bullshit? I have a feeling there is some terrible misunderstanding here.

>>My 2009 328i has heated seats I've never once had to pay to activate.

Yes, what's your point?

>>No one in a fleet vehicle pays for their own 'upgrades', man.

In modern 2021+ and higher BMW models in the US, they do, man. That is literally BMW's payment model on NEW cars. Don't know why you'd assume I'm talking about a 2009 model.

>>DLC on cars and people are here defending it

So far I had like 40 replies to my comment with maybe one or two people defending the practice. Is it really worth getting upset over it(the people commenting, not the practice)?

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