Opinion: what's so wrong with charging a subscription fee for heated seats?

BMW recently lit up the internet with an announcement about heated seats. Huh? Hard to see why people got so hot under the collar about getting hot under the pants. Anyhow. Heated seats and steering wheel, auto-dip lights and some driver-assist features were made available on a monthly fee. The hardware is built in to all cars, simplifying the production process, and the fee activates it, telling the car’s ECU to light up a screen menu icon.

On the face of it, BMW is taking the mick in charging a fee to owners to use something that’s already present. Cue the pitchfork trolling mob. But, at risk of being seen as an industry shill, let’s invert it. A carmaker is doing what it always did with optional extras, charging for them, except it’s giving you the flexibility to pay only when you want and not when you don’t. Heated seats in winter. Motorway driver assist for a summer roadtrip. It also means that the buyer of a secondhand car can get stuff the original owner didn’t order. As long as the prices are reasonable, everyone’s happy, eh? But what is reasonable? After all, to send a message over the air that unlocks already-present features costs BMW precisely zero pence.

Oh c’mon. There’s R&D expense. And it’s not like we aren’t used to this sort of commerce. You have apps on your phone, right? A smartphone has always been a software-driven product, so paying for apps, often a monthly sub, seems natural. Most of us are still stuck with the notion that a car is a hardware device. So we view it with a different lens. Bum-warmers have always been a tangible physical thing. BMW is messing with our perception.

It famously happened a few years ago with Photoshop: a piece of software you once bought. Then its maker Adobe moved to a subscription model, and photographers everywhere screamed in fear that either the monthly price would rapaciously ramp up, or the thing would be switched off and they’d be left with years-worth of unviewable photos.

BMW isn’t the only one. Tesla offers a £6,800 ‘Full Self-Driving’ download even though it can’t actually be used now or in the foreseeable future. BMW says the monthly fee is designed to let you play with the feature for four weeks. Then if you like it, pay a one-off amount similar to the new-car option price, to own it permanently. With the advanced driver assistance, that makes sense: you can’t know if you’ll like it until you’ve tried it. Some people don’t like their bum balmed either.

Standing further back, this stuff won’t stop. Manufacturers have realised they might not be selling so many cars in future, as people turn to car sharing. Besides, electric cars need less servicing and parts, which have always made big money for car makers and dealers. So they’re frantically looking for ways to make up for lost revenue. Selling you software and services over the car’s life is one way to do it. If ever BMW breaks its bond of trust and remotely switches off the features you’ve paid for, then the pitchfork mob really can have at it.