BMW has boldly gone where no car maker should ever have went. Advertisements in cars. The ultimate in distraction for the modern driver. It takes the concept of a vehicle that is fully connected to a whole new level. For now the ad is optional; users must click it for it to display.
BMW have called the video an "optional brand experience" and say it's different to a traditional ad.
"The animation does not automatically play when the vehicle starts. Drivers are presented with a banner in the Control Display and can choose whether they would like to activate the experience," A BMW spokesperson said.
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Backlash Against BMW for Ads in Cars
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(Score: 3, Touché) by mrpg on Friday August 07, @10:41PM (15 children)
optional brand experience
mistakes were made
etc
(Score: 4, Interesting) by corey on Friday August 07, @10:45PM (14 children)
I rarely call things shocking but this sort of is. What the hell are they thinking at BMW? They exist in a market which has unprecedented strong competition from Chinese manufacturers with declining sales as a result. So they go and put ads in their cars? Do they have no idea what it’s like to drive a car? I’d have thought they would be having crisis meetings given the competition now, and trying to work out how to make better cars than the Chinese. Honestly Beemer is the last brand I’d have expected to do this.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @12:12AM (3 children)
I want to know how any DOT (department of transportation) has allowed screens in cars at all. You can get a ticket and hefty fine for "distracted driving".
(Score: 5, Interesting) by corey on Saturday August 08, @10:56AM (2 children)
Yeah totally.
For the first time in my life, I drove (as a backseat passenger) in a Tesla this week. My friend had bought a 2nd hand one. I couldn't believe the way they have foregone all normal dash odo/speedo/indicators, for a single big iPad-style screen in the middle. So the driver has to look to the side, to the big bright IPS LCD, to see the speed they're going at. It also showed a graphic of his car in the middle and all cars and people around it. Amazing stuff. But such a distraction. Then, while driving, he was showing us how he could make fart sounds come from anywhere in the car. It seemed like Tesla went a mile ahead of other car manufacturers and made their cars that much less safe again.
I've been wanting to get my motorcycle licence, but the way things are going, including the huge rise of sales of massive utes here, I think it's getting too risky.
(Score: 3, Informative) by OrugTor on Saturday August 08, @03:20PM (1 child)
Tesla: the most-used metrics are in the top left corner. I find them easier to glance at than the shadowed, beyond-the-steering-wheel dash. I don't use anything else on the screen while driving. Right from the start the screen's principal function was to sell subscriptions to premium entertainment.
(Score: 2) by atwork on Sunday August 09, @11:28PM
There you go, Corey - the most useful things are on the wrong side of the screen.
Re motorbikes: have you noticed that they seem to be travelling in pairs or more these days? I have been wondering whether it's a safety thing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Saturday August 08, @12:42AM (4 children)
The suits are in panic mode because they know China can build cars faster, cheaper, AND better. So they're trying to milk the customers dry before it falls apart.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 08, @02:55AM (1 child)
I see this in a lot of companies. One man, usually an engineer or similar builder, builds his dream and makes the perfect thing. Yes, it's wonderful. Clean, precise, efficient,
His dream propagated rapidly. Everyone wants one. Mass production and economies of scale mean everyone who wants one can buy one. Marginal production costs approach the cost of material to make it.
.
Then the original creator ages out. His family only sees his creation as a cash cow and sells the company to investors who see the company as the sum of the market value of it's reputation plus it's assets. With the reputation worth far more than anything else.
The founder was building a legacy for his offspring. He built with quality stone. He designed it to last indefinitely.
The Investment folks just want maximal quarterly return. For maybe three years.
Get it listed. Sell shares. Raise capital. Pay themselves astronomical salaries.
They buy this asset the founder's family has no idea how to run. Investment capital is raised. Dedicated people are replaced with "team players" who understand, participate, and enforce the new leadership paradigms. Enshittification rules. For a while, the company's former customers are milked until they realize what just happened and close wallets.
Then phase 2 of the business plan: sell assets.
"Surplus" land, buildings, tools, machinery, and other means of production go on the auction block. "Deadwood" employees are laid off. The company is now staffed "lean and mean". If their existence doesn't directly end up in shareholder return, they go. So those who Excel in selling dreams to naive buyers are kept, those practicing the ancient art of craftsmanship are long gone, on social security, or now on unemployment.
After the first round of IPO, pump-n-dump of highly promoted stock price has run its course, the first rounds of investors have sold their highly run-up stock, the customers are gone, the means of production are sold off, it's time for the last round. The Cash Cow is now completely dry. Even it's manure has already been sold.
Delist the stock. Send consolation letters to the suckers who didn't participate with the new business paradigm. Sell their names and personal info to other professional financial advisors building sucker lists of people still willing to shake the hand of a suit-and-tie.
I make no qualms about my age. It's almost 76. I have lived long enough to have seen this same scenario play out three times, where I was personally in this situation. It played out the same way all three times.
It always started with a smaller company and a buy-out / acquisition.
It has made me very distrustful of men wearing suits, handshakes, that horse-eating-briar forces smile and a MBA degree. First thing they do is jut their hand at me to see if I am properly conditioned ( gullible ) enough to shake it.
Although I hate having to work with MBA, as we seem to think so different ( My training is Engineering, and almost by definition, I have already surrendered my fealty to Physical Law ), I realize the need of the MBA to work with other levels of permission-givers to obtain the necessary permissions required to produce anything. Or go on welfare. As the ones privileged to give permission are not tasked with providing resources to meet their requirements. A whole class of parasites are required to mediate agreements to allow production between the worker-bees and the permission-giver law-maker class.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 08, @03:23AM
I watched the cycle you describe happen in software in the early 1990s, again and again, but the whole cycle time was generally 2-3 years. Build a great product with great support and a great development pipeline. Sell out, support becomes brain-dead, development pipeline stops flowing, the thing is on life-support, and making higher sales volumes than ever for another year or two.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Saturday August 08, @03:57AM
Except that BMW is not a brand that sells to people who want to spend less money on a car.
I can hypothetically see the threat from the "better" dimension, but to burn their reputation is perhaps the dumbest choice.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday August 08, @03:33PM
I see this a lot with "evil behavior of private capital" in other fields
1) Industry insiders and some of us outsiders see the company will be dead in a year and they can extract at most $1B before its dead
2) Private capital has a ton of experience crashing companies, they make a pitch they can crash it in two years and make $2B along the way, twice as much as the noobs running it now.
3) Sell to private capital for $1.1B, everybody wins, previous owners get 10% more than they would without the sale and private capital makes $900M if they don't screw up.
4) Company starts circling the drain in a very public fashion doing sometimes crazy looking, but short term profitable stuff (because all they have left is the short term LOL), this behavior can't be ignored by the public anymore (this is where BMW is now)
5) "Private Capital is teh ev!l workers of the world unite! it was a perfectly viable company until management sank it on purpose" nonsense starts
6) Company finally crashes out and everyone comes out ahead, although suffering from endless complaining. There would be more complaining if everyone was poorer, if they had not gone out that way, but whatever.
So yeah BMW's done, they've given up, now its time to "extract all value" on the way out. Sure, BMW will never go out of business just like these car companies never went out of business: Oldsmobile or AMC or Plymouth or Saturn or DeLorean, or Eagle, or Geo or International Harvester Trucks or ... Also technically, GMC closed in 2009 and was resurrected as a zombie. This could happen to BMW.
I would theorize that BMW as a brand is too generational, like Oldsmobile was toward the end. The type of people who worshipped the brand are aging out of the car buying pool so when the Chinese pick the carcass and shut it down for good, its not going to be missed by the younger people.
To me the brand means middling style and performance but demonstrate maximal consumption to people who are impressed by such expenditures. For the kind of people who won't stop beaming with pride when bragging how replacing the spark plugs costs $5K or similar situations. I won't miss BMW LOL.
(Score: 5, Funny) by RootTwo on Saturday August 08, @01:20AM (2 children)
I remember when test driving a German car over a decade ago, my son asked why there were so few cup holders (he had counted 12+ in our Toyota Sienna). The salesman replied that the Germans take their driving seriously and don't want any distractions while driving. Times have changed.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Saturday August 08, @03:41PM (1 child)
My wife has one and my interpretation would be different than the salesperson, Toyota sees plastic molds are cheap and they love interior panels that cost $1500+ so to solve the problem of bottles/cups ranging from 8 oz to 2 liters, they mold fixed holders of all sizes all over the car. You can very nearly fit a 2L in the door pockets... I think they're designed for 1L bottles or more likely 40oz malt liquor.
BMW would make a single robot arm contraption full of levers and rotators and gyroscopes, that'll hold anything from a shot glass to a pony keg of beer, but it will be designed to not last long before needing a $15K replacement, about which the owner can proudly tell everyone around them they have no problem paying $15K for minor service calls. Its tiresome.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Tuesday August 11, @01:37PM
That sounds about right on the BMW robot arm, except you forgot about the interlock that will render the whole car inoperable should anything on the cup holding arm fail.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 08, @03:21AM
> Honestly Beemer is the last brand I’d have expected to do this.
Beemer, Merc, Aston F-ing Martin and the rest sold out 20+ years ago. They're cashing in on their brand value, not building a business for the future. They're all globalized, have no pride of place or company history anymore. They are managed quarter to quarter by intenerant "leadership" more interested in their own exit strategy than building anything for the future.
Even elite brands like McLaren hire "Perceived Quality Experts" who are all about what potential customers think about the product, nothing to do with actual quality, durability or performance, just perception. This is the kind of man who will sell a premium engine swap kit filled with stainless steel hardware...https://boltdepot.com/Fastener-Information/Materials-and-Grades/Materials
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @11:59AM
You're thinking of the historical BMW, it died well over a decade ago.
There are still good engineers and the likes working for them, but their current corporate incarnation is so full of 'B' Arkers this sort of behaviour should not really surprise you. (cf. Jaguar, it's not unique)
We've reached Kornbluth's future a lot faster than he reckoned we would, if we give idiots unfettered and easy access to the sorts of technologies that they barely understand (if at all), why be surprised when they pull these sorts of moronic stunts with it?
It's increasingly becoming the same story everywhere you look, and once the corporate managerial structures become top heavy with button pressing functional(barely) morons...well, you only have to look around you to see what the outcome of that is.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 07, @10:50PM (6 children)
There should be no screens in a car. Every function that a screen can perform was performed in 1960s vehicles. It doesn't take a touch screen to do ANYTHING! And, some people are revolting. They are telling dealers what they want, and if the dealer can't deliver, there will be no sale.
https://www.cleverdude.com/content/the-no-tech-car-trend-drivers-are-rejecting-screens-and-sensors/ [cleverdude.com]
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @01:12AM
OK, boomer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @01:57AM (3 children)
I'd love to visit a few local car dealers and tell them that I'd like to buy a new car, sans screen--and I'd be telling the truth. The problem is that they won't take me seriously...because my old (no screens) cars all make me look poor.
How to get the sales manager to take me seriously? Show up with a recent bank statement that shows I'm able to pay cash? Show up without a car (ride there on one of my $5K+ bicycles?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 08, @04:42AM
I guess start here: https://www.slashgear.com/2047891/new-car-models-use-physical-buttons-knobs/ [slashgear.com] https://daxstreet.com/cars/366299/10-best-2026-vehicles-that-dont-rely-on-giant-touchscreens/ [daxstreet.com]
The first link shows you what the dash looks like - the second link, not so much.
After a short conversation with DuckAI, I'm basically told to stick with the used car market, or to look into the conversion market. He also suggests commercial fleet vehicles, some of which are stripped of all the silly shit. I wonder about government fleet vehicles . . . if I knew where the FBI or the police purchased their stripped down models, I might visit that dealership for a bargain.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday August 08, @03:49PM
You're hanging out with the wrong crowd. My suburb has enough boomers that they have amateur car shows where they show off their 60s hot rod cars to each other.
The UI is usually steering wheel, 3 pedals, a shifter, a switch for the ignition, a pushbutton for starter, maybe a nitrous kit, sometimes an oversized chrome tachometer.
Technically, you don't need a speedometer in my state to get registered although oddly enough you need working windshield wipers which says something about our rainy climate LOL.
Most of these cars are generally designed to be driven no further than a quarter mile, and for a very short duration of time at that.
I can respect the engineering effort and I like the UI better than ugly new car UIs.
The kind of people that want to spend hours playing with the UI in KDE and Gnome to bring about Linux on the Desktop, instead of actually using the computer to do things, are the kind of people designing car UIs, the purpose is to play with the UI as fashionably as possible, not to drive the car, and their products suck.
Should the ideal footware be steel toed work boots or the highest imaginable girlie glitter high heels? You can only buy hyperfeminized cars of the latter category at this time, unfortunately. Ditto "linux on the desktop".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09, @10:24AM
Can't do that here in Oz. Law says that all new vehicles must have a reversing camera. Need a screen to display it, and once you have that they load all the other shit on it too...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 08, @09:59AM
It takes all my undivided attention to even reply to your post on my touchscreen Android.
I am always having to see if my intended action registered, and if not, I have to backspace and try again.
I can see doing this while at home.
I flat will not try to drive and do this.
I cannot backspace out of an accident.
I should be able operate my controls by feel alone.
I simply can't spare my eyes - Not while driving!
Nor can I play shoot-em-up videogames and interact with a phone simultaneously.
I am just not made that way.
It takes all my remaining mental bandwidth to scan a few mechanical gauges during lulls in surrounding traffic.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday August 07, @10:50PM
With how crappy and ad infested everything is these days, I am honestly surprised there was any kind of "backlash".
So did the manufacture actually DO anything about this (can't read TFA, the site is blocking me as a bot).
Of course they will keep pumping this again and again out until people eventually accept it.
I hate this planet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snotnose on Friday August 07, @11:02PM
Give me a break. I'd rather pull my pants down and bend over than "activate the experience."
Being the dumbest idiot in the land and president of the US should be 2 different people.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @12:13AM (3 children)
My old ass 2000s car came with satellite radio. If you don't subscribe you know what it does? Endlessly play ads. Can't remove it from your rotation so when switching from the steering wheel you'd get blasted.
I ended up having to delete the feature using manufacturer tools and disconnected the antenna. It was super obnoxious and this kind of "experience" in a car I'm paying 30-40k+ for would be an instant return.
People really put up with this? At this level of spending there is no such thing as "no" from the dealer. Million other vehicles you can buy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Saturday August 08, @12:44AM (1 child)
If only there was a company you could buy an aftermarket radio from... https://www.crutchfield.com/ [crutchfield.com]
Bought a new radio for my wife's 2012 vehicle and they know exactly what adapters and wiring harnesses you'll need. Even have a little box that makes the steering wheel controls work with the new radio.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @02:31PM
Not always that easy. I have a dashboard LED display which aftermarket would kill. Plus it's you know.. money. Adapters, converters, plastic kit to cover the hole, possibly lost USB plug and aux.
Stock radio already plays MP3s off USB. Project vs unplugging an antenna and telling the car it never came with XM among other things.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Saturday August 08, @12:17PM
Not everyone puts up with this.
I ended up with a Craigslist buy. This was over ten years ago. Still have the van.
Paid $3500. Then put another $15K into it to customize it. It had several deferred maintenance issues I am preparing to put another $15K into it. Paint job, new seat covers, Radiator descale, possibly replace. I may try a Formic Acid radiator flush. Copper radiator. Solder blooms. Galvanic corrosion issue.
Fundamentally, it's a sound old-school design that many of the old-school mechanics understand. One usually does not need anything special to work on it. Usually, mobile mechanics do pretty good. One thing I have found out: mechanics usually hate electrical issues. Often I am on my own. I have a few mechanics that will do remove-and-replace jobs for me for electrical stuff if I agree to pay their rate, and waive any responsibility for the attempt being successful. It's a 30+ year old machine and they are not familiar with it's wiring. Professional mechanics know shortcuts for wrench work, and how to not break things.
I don't want the newer ones. Too enshittified. Too finicky. Too much of a pain-in-the-ass to have.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Saturday August 08, @12:56AM
These are the same chucklefucks who thought that subscription hardware in the form of heated seats was a good idea. The BMW management strata needs to be completely purged. I swore to never buy a BMW after that fiasco; this next chapter in their demise just shows how justified that oath was.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday August 08, @10:32AM (2 children)
I do wonder who wanted this. Who sat in their BMW and thought, You know what this car needs ... More ads. Ads on all these displays. Yes That is what the owner/driver wants. I guess I'm not a BMW kind of guy but no I don't want ads on the display in my car. Did all the money they paid for the car somehow rot their remaining few brain cells?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08, @12:42PM
What puzzles me is someone in upper corporate echelon is hiring these Dumbo's into leadership positions to implement these frustrations. Find that guy - probably some entrenched senior executive somewhere, and get him out of the company before he destroys the company reputation.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday August 08, @01:22PM
It is the decision made by a company who doesn't give a crap about their customers, and sees them as cash-cows to be milked at every opportunity.
Then they wonder why their market share is collapsing, the Chinese are eating their lunch on new cars, while everyone else is buying second hand "pre-screen" cars at such a clip that that used prices are approaching new car prices in Europe.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday August 10, @09:19PM
What they really need is for ads to be watched before the vehicle can be started, or before the doors can be re-opened to get out of the vehicle.
For the bestest and very most goodest possible customer experience, of coarse corse course.
American: It's not a race, bro.
Australian: Eats note uh rice, mite.