BMW is selling a subscription plan for seat warmers — for $17 a month

BMW is resorting to an unusual business model for car buyers in some countries: if you want heated seats, you’ll have to subscribe to a $ 17 a month subscription plan to warm up your body .

BMW’s subscription plan for seat heaters sells in the UK, where the fare is about $ 17 a month, and in South Korea, where it costs about $ 18 a month, according to The Verge, which reported earlier on development.

According to BMW’s UK site, some cars are installed with seat heaters “at no extra cost”. But to access the actual seat warm-up feature, customers must purchase a $ 17 monthly subscription plan or pay about $ 416 to unlock the service “unlimitedly”. Once the purchase is made, the seat heaters “are then activated in your vehicle,” the site notes.

More companies are turning to subscription models, as these plans provide a steady source of revenue for businesses, and have gained popularity in recent years, according to a 2021 report from consulting firm McKinsey. From 2021 to 2018, subscription plans grew more than 300%, or five times faster than the revenues of S&P 500 companies, the report notes.

The subscription plan for seat warming sparked a backlash on social media, suggesting that consumers may be growing wary of monthly rates for everything from their video streaming services to clothing, such as Amazon’s Personal Shopper service.

And while consumers may be accustomed to paying monthly fees for services like satellite radio in their cars, it’s still unusual to pay a subscription fee for a car’s hardware items. After all, usually when a consumer buys a car, all the hardware is included as part of the purchase price: tires, seats, steering wheel, defroster, and so on.

“The car will come with all the necessary components, but a payment must be made to remove a block of software,” a Twitter observer noted. “Welcome to the hell of microtransactions.”

Another Twitter user commented: “BMW is starting to sell a subscription fee for heated seats to remove software that prevents you from accessing them. Capitalism does not generate innovation. Capitalism generates a future where people have to jailbreak your car to get features that are already built into it “.

The company said BMW does not sell the seat heater subscription in the US.

“Options like heated seats are demanded in more than 90% of BMWs sold in the U.S.,” a spokesman said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch. “North American BMW does not expect factory option purchase levels to change significantly in the future.”

But in 2020, BMW in the U.S. launched a set of subscription services called “Custom Features”. These include a dashboard camera function called BMW Drive Recorder and a service called BMW Remote Engine Start function.

“With BMW Functions on Demand, customers will be able to explore new software-based functions in the short term by purchasing a test or purchasing this function directly over a period of time or during the life of the vehicle,” the spokesman noted. .

These services “are primarily intended for a digital after-sales solution and will not affect the options that were requested at the time of vehicle purchase,” he added.

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