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Comment by discopicante | Hacker News Reader

Maybe that's the point – more consistency in the manufacturing line might actually reduce costs for BMW and/or allow them to ship more vehicles faster.

Perhaps the majority cost for the option is not for the equipment but for the labor involved in installing it.

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So then make it a standard feature. If it's cheap enough to install, it's cheap enough to include as a base model feature.

If BMW can earn more money by always installing it but making it optional rather than making it a standard feature, guess what BMW will do?

Does that consider the fact that people might choose a different car instead because this is not included by default? Or perhaps BMW bets on the Apple effect, that people won't chose a different car anyway.

Again, though, that labor is paid for either way if the installation was already done and it wasn't activated. Essentially, I think the argument being made here is that -- whether this was true or not -- when the heated seats had to be paid for up front to even have them in your car, you could tell yourself that they legitimately cost something (for the parts or the installation or whatever: that doesn't matter) related to how much you were paying for them... but if everyone has them and you are merely paying to turn them on the facade dissolves and you almost have to assume that the feature didn't cost much to put in your car and you are simply being charged as much as they think they can convince you to pay, which is often true but never fun to realize.

It's not the labour itself, it's the variability in that labour. Complexity has a cost over and above the raw labour costs, and I can well believe that someone's spreadsheet tells them that the additional parts and labour is cheaper in terms of both supply chain management and reliability than retaining that degree of freedom in that particular supplier relationship.

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