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From Ars Technica:
[...] BMW is planning to move some features of its new cars to a subscription model, something it announced on Wednesday during a briefing for the press on the company's digital plans.
[...] the Bavarian carmaker has plans to apply that model to features like heated seats. BMW says that owners can "benefit in advance from the opportunity to try out the products for a trial period of one month, after which they can book the respective service for one or three years." The company also says that it could allow the second owner of a BMW to activate features that the original purchaser declined.
From Roadshow:
These options will be enabled via the car or the new My BMW app. While some will be permanent and assigned to the car, others will be temporary, with mentioned periods ranging from three months to three years.
[...] So, yes, you could theoretically only pay for heated seats in the colder months if you like, or perhaps save a few bucks by only enabling automatic high-beams on those seasons when the days are shortest.
Also at Hot Hardware, The Drive, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, TechSpot, SlashGear & Forbes.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Friday July 03 2020, @11:41PM (11 children)
Seriously whats to stop someone from wiring around them or just plain taking over the cars network.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 04 2020, @12:19AM (8 children)
Mainly warranty coverage I would think. I just made another post farther up about this; it's going to turn into a court case of whether they can legally refuse warranty claims for hacked vehicles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @12:37AM
Can I sue M$ for the same offence to my pc?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:46AM (6 children)
I guess also the car insurance will take that as welcome excuse not to pay. Probably using a rule buried somewhere deep in the small print so it holds up in court.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday July 04 2020, @12:17PM (1 child)
Existing insurance clauses on "modifications" are probably sufficient, already used (at least where I am) to cover (on not-cover) ECU remapped / chipped cars.
Perhaps more interesting question wrt. insurance is if you are currently required to declare even factory-fitted optional extras in order to get valid cover, with a subscription model where you get to enable or disable factory-fit optional extras at will, do you then have to inform your insurance every time you change the subscription in order for cover to be valid?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:54AM
I have never heard of any car insurance in America where you have to declare any kind of options or modifications, unless you're trying to get coverage for those (in which case they increase the replacement value of the car so they affect the rates). Generally you just give them a VIN number and they can look up the book value from that. They will ask about some safety features and maybe give you a small discount for some of those. But something like heated seats is not going to significantly affect a car's value enough for insurance to care about it.
What's really ridiculous about this is heated seats are something that probably cost about $10-20 at the factory for components plus installation labor. You can go on Ebay right now and buy heated seat components (aftermarket) for about $50, though you'll have to do a lot of work to install them since you have to take the seat covers off, and also do some wiring. These things are just not worth much money, not like LED headlight housings, for instance. So the idea of paying a monthly fee for something that's so dirt-cheap compared to the cost of the car just boggles my mind.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:49AM (3 children)
That won't hold up in court. People have been modifying cars for over a century now, and insurance can't just not pay up because of it, unless of course the modification can be shown to contribute to the crash. Heated seats don't count.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:59AM (2 children)
I should also add: your comment seems to indicate that the insurance companies would collude with the automakers to prevent hacking like this. I don't see that happening at all; people are *already* hacking cars (and have been for a long time actually, at least for ECUs, but now they're doing it for infotainment systems too), and insurance companies don't care. Insurance companies don't collude with automakers to increase automaker profits; why would they? Insurance companies only care about their own profits, and you hacking your car to enable heated seats doesn't affect that; they don't give two shits about you making modifications like that. Just don't tell them you drive 5000 miles per year and then get in a wreck and have them find out you've been driving 50,000 miles a year, because then they may very well deny your claim because you lied to them about how much you drive the car, which directly affects their risk. Your modifications (esp. non-performance ones) don't affect their risk at all, so they just don't care.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday July 06 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
They might care if your hacked heated seat catches fire.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 06 2020, @08:43PM
That's about as likely as your car spontaneously exploding. These heaters don't use that much power; "full hot" is certainly with the full 14.4V across the electrodes, and it's warm to sit on, but certainly not remotely hot enough to cause ignition of anything.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:41AM (1 child)
How many of the people able and willing to do this would buy a BMW to begin with?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday July 04 2020, @12:27PM
Need to thing about the long term, give it ten years and those BMWs will change hands for a few hundred notes, at which price people will be happy to risk messing with it to enable a little luxury.