Paying for your car - BMW style

[niemeyjt]

We have had Software as a Service - now, courtesy of BMW, we have Car as a Service. Thin end of a nasty wedge!

BMW charging owners £15 a month to switch on heated seats ... that are already in the car

BMW is charging car owners £15 per month to switch on heated seats, in the first subscription service of its kind.

The manufacturer has rolled out a new add-ons service that allows drivers to activate heating on front seats and steering wheels, if they did not purchase the feature when they originally bought the vehicle.

Customers can choose between a free one-month trial for heated driver and passenger seats, a £15 rolling monthly subscription, or longer options lasting one year – costing £150 – three years at £250 or an unlimited purchase for £350.

The steering wheel option costs £10 per month, rising to £150 for a yearly subscription, meaning that both types of heaters would cost £25 per month.

source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/0 ... ready-car/

I guess they also must charge for the indicators.

[DaveW]

Let’s see how long it takes for a YouTube video to appear on how to turn it on yourself.

As an aside I was was in a Porsche Macan yesterday that had air conditioned front seats. Nice cool air is forced through the seats keeping bum and back cool, very nice.

[exile]

I was in a Polski Fiat once that had a similar facility - mind I think it had rather more to do with the rusted/perforated floor pan!

[Hotrodder]

When I was a kid in the US there was a product called an Air Cushion. A thin woven pad that you placed over the seat back. Only about an inch thick it kept you from sticking to the car's vinyl seat. The air circulating through the cushion gave a significant cooling effect due to evaporation of your own perspiration. Cheap, clever, and didn't involve any moving parts or ozone layer dissolving refrigerants. Nowhere near as entertaining as the air conditioning in my grandfather's T-bird that would actually form a coating of frost on its chromed metal output vents.

[Liz]

Having had a Volvo 480 in the late 1980s, with all the bells and whistles available at the time, I am very suspicious of anything and everything extra and electronic.
That car had Volvo's Lifetime Guarantee. By the time it was sold it had cost Volvo thousands more than they had planned.
The best was one Easter Saturday, when the old Volvo gag 'yer lights are on' was current : my lights stayed on, all the time.
Volvo garage said sorry, you will just have to disconnect and reconnect the battery every time you stop.
No. No way. I left the garage with a courtesy car, I don't know how the sales guy got home

[niemeyjt]

Volvo 480 - wasn't that really a DAF?

I have to say I like my V70 - and the 740 before it. But those are proper Volvos.

[Hotrodder]

Is that the one that can drive off the top of a multi-story car park and the crash test dummy gets out and walks away?
That Volvo ad must have attracted a lot of very bad drivers thinking they could get away with any form of stupidity.

[niemeyjt]

Well having not driven off a multi-story car park, I cannot comment on that specificly.

But I walked away from the crash which wrote off the 740 - whilst the other car became Suffolk Constabulary's first open-top courtesy of Suffolk Fire and Rescue cutting the roof off to get the driver out and cart him off to hospital.

[beejay]

About 1988 I had an eight week old Volvo 340. Driving along the A11 I was hit, head on, by a German tourist's car when he decided to picnic on the grass verge on my side of the road. Both cars were a write-off but no injuries sustained.

He had a courtesy car delivered on site by ADAC before my insurer's breakdown truck arrived.

I had no problem with the claim receiving the price I had paid eight weeks earlier. The German driver wrote to me a few months later enquiring if the matter had been resolved satisfactorily.

[rabbit]

If it was a service that I could pay for as and when used rather than a monthly fee it might be attractive. I can’t remember how much BMW charged me for my heated seats but I am sure it was not cheap. I only use them perhaps 20 times a year and only in the depth of winter. The rest of the year they are an under-used asset so it might actually be cheaper and better for the planet