They have an option to buy it outright that appears to be priced at the same level as a typical upgrade. They also have 1 and 3 year subscriptions. This is actually a net win for both BMW and for consumers. You can do things like "try extensively before you buy" or even choose to only subscribe during the winter (which they probably expect a lot of people to do). BMW benefits because they're almost certainly expanding the total value they capture in upgrades. It's no longer a single customer decision point. Really savvy and perfectly sensible.
Haha nope. If I buy the car, I own everything that is in it. Installing extra parts or features? Sure, I'll pay for that. Hardware that's already in the car, and disabled just so the manufacturer can try to squeeze more money out of me? Never. I'll either enable it myself, or refuse to support companies that do such a thing if I can't.
Subscription models like this one need to be punished, hard, and/or simply rendered unprofitable. Maybe a few rich chumps are willing to pay, but I think the vast majority of car buyers have no interest in being nickel-and-dimed for the privilege of using hardware they already paid for.
How though? If you buy the car and either don't enable it or bypass it, they still made a sale. Everyone who pays for the feature is pure profit. There's no downside unless potential buyers opt for a Mercedes instead of a BMW. But once they are all doing it, the die is cast.
But you would pay more for it if they had to put it in only certain models based on the packaging. They've done it with satellite radio for a long time now.
Right, so incentivize them to stop trying to reduce competition with software locks. If they can provide the same hardware for cheaper by exploiting economies of scale, that's what we should require them to do. That's what capitalism is good at doing. Software locks are anti-competitive.
