[discopicante]

I am wondering how many commenters actually read the (clickbait) article; BMW offers the option to purchase the feature permanently. The subscription is optional.

In any case, I see customer value in the optionality for this specific case. Perhaps the biggest reason for not purchasing heated seats is that customers have never used them in the past. Perhaps customers would otherwise not want to commit up-front for a feature they think they don't need or will only use 3-5 months out of the year.

[invalidusernam3]

The fact that the hardware needed for the heated seats is already there and you're paying to turn it on is the weird part. For BMW, the cost of the heated seats must be very low if they're prepared to install them in all cars without knowing if the consumer will pay for the them or now.

It's like buying a new laptop and paying to unlock additional RAM that is already installed, just not available. It would make me feel like the cost to the manufacturer is so low if they're prepared to risk it, that me paying for it after the fact feels like I'm getting ripped off (or that I've already actually payed for it in the original cost)

[laumars]

I don't disagree with your point but it's worth noting that this practice does actually happen in IT as well. For example some software licenses are tied to physical hardware (that was common with servers back in the day) so you'd often have to hardware disabled at the software level. AMD also sold a bunch of functioning 4 and 8 core CPUs with cores disabled when their 3 and 6 core CPUs were selling faster than AMD could meet demands. Albeit in that latter case it wasn't a subscription service to have them enabled. In fact with computing hardware, it's really common for the same hardware features to be supported across a range of models but only have specific features enabled in software (eg with graphics cards).

[regularfry]

It's slightly different (but only slightly) in the CPU case in that the disabling they're doing is a special case of an operation they have to do anyway. I don't know if it's the case for the specific 3 and 6 core AMD chips you're referring to, but it's common practice for that sort of CPU to be a 4 or 8-core chip where one or more core has failed validation. Cores that have failed testing then get disabled, and the CPU is bucketed into a lower grade but is still sold as a working unit. All AMD would have been doing here is using the disabling process which must already exist to intentionally nerf working cores because the yields they were getting in the various buckets were too good for the market conditions.

I'm not sure what BMW are thinking with the seat heaters. I suspect someone thinks they can make a saving by reducing variation in seat construction and that saving offsets the additional material costs. All the software/subscription/after-market nonsense flows from that, but the fundamental design driver is, I would bet, manufacturing complexity.

[laumars]

As I said, they were working 4 and 8 core CPUs that had a working core disabled and then solder at a cheaper price as 3 or 6 core CPUs.

The reason AMD did this was because they had the genius idea of selling off some faulty CPUs at a cheaper price but with the faulty core disabled. However those cheaper CPUs sold so well that AMD ended up having to disable working cores on non-faulty units to meet demand.

Since you could actually unlock those cores, lots more people started to buy 3 and 6 core CPUs in the hope that “CPU roulette” might pay off and they’d end up with a stable 4 or 8 core computer for the cost of a 3 or 6 core one.

[schwartzworld]

> the fundamental design driver is, I would bet, manufacturing complexity.

One of them. If it was only about manufacturing, they could just as easily make heated seats standard on all bmws.

I think a big motivator would also be the ability for owners to opt in at a later date. In most cars you only have the chance to offer an upgrade at the time of purchase. Making it a software thing means that I can add it on 6 months after buying the car. Or the second owner can add it on.

[regularfry]

The point is that they wouldn't have that marketing flexibility if they weren't going to do the technical thing for manufacturing reasons. Like, the marketing folks will be all over that crap once they've got the capability, but I doubt they would be the original reason it was done.

[afiori]

> the fundamental design driver is, I would bet, manufacturing complexity

I think that recurring monthly revenue is also highly appreciated, especially considering how other industries (game, movie) are moving in spite of manufacturing complexity.

[regularfry]

Appreciated, yes, but I wouldn't be shocked if they did it anyway even in the absence of the recurring revenue opportunity.

[discopicante]

Maybe that's the point – more consistency in the manufacturing line might actually reduce costs for BMW and/or allow them to ship more vehicles faster.

Perhaps the majority cost for the option is not for the equipment but for the labor involved in installing it.

[grendelt]

So then make it a standard feature. If it's cheap enough to install, it's cheap enough to include as a base model feature.

[rob74]

If BMW can earn more money by always installing it but making it optional rather than making it a standard feature, guess what BMW will do?

[sebazzz]

Does that consider the fact that people might choose a different car instead because this is not included by default? Or perhaps BMW bets on the Apple effect, that people won't chose a different car anyway.

[saurik]

Again, though, that labor is paid for either way if the installation was already done and it wasn't activated. Essentially, I think the argument being made here is that -- whether this was true or not -- when the heated seats had to be paid for up front to even have them in your car, you could tell yourself that they legitimately cost something (for the parts or the installation or whatever: that doesn't matter) related to how much you were paying for them... but if everyone has them and you are merely paying to turn them on the facade dissolves and you almost have to assume that the feature didn't cost much to put in your car and you are simply being charged as much as they think they can convince you to pay, which is often true but never fun to realize.

[regularfry]

It's not the labour itself, it's the variability in that labour. Complexity has a cost over and above the raw labour costs, and I can well believe that someone's spreadsheet tells them that the additional parts and labour is cheaper in terms of both supply chain management and reliability than retaining that degree of freedom in that particular supplier relationship.

[kevin_thibedeau]

IBM does this with their mainframes.

[kabdib]

Intel wanted to do this with floating point operations on the Pentium, in the 1990s. A set of e-fuses would give you access to (say) another hundred million floating point adds or something, then the CPU would burn a fuse and you'd have to buy more (a final fuse would do a complete unlock).

Yes, it's a horrible idea.

Cashing in on Excel users is what Intel marketing was betting on. Only it wasn't just Excel users using the FPU: One of the things that killed this plan was the upswing in 3-D games that used floating point math (in other words, Quake).

[thenickdude]

Intel is bringing this back right now: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-SD...

[jquery]

Good reminder to stay with AMD if that’s an option for you.

[ssl232]

And oscilloscope manufacturers. You can typically "unlock" more bandwidth with a code after purchasing. The delivered device is capable of sampling at greater bandwidth but the software prevents it above the paid-for bandwidth. I think Keysight are probably the worst offenders but I think many of them do it now. FOSS firmware for modern scopes seems a pipe dream given many now use custom FPGAs.

[vr46]

That’s not the only perspective. Suppose everybody started building devices and vehicles packed with hardware that the user might never access or use? What happens to the device when it’s decommissioned? Is the breaker’s yard allowed to strip and part out the subscription-only hardware? Why should a thousand customers burn fuel pointlessly to haul round features they don’t use? Who owns the actual hardware in the event of not-subscribing? Suppose the unwanted hardware causes failures or interference elsewhere?

It’s one thing to toggle feature flags, but I doubt the seats are heated by overclocking an Intel i9 on bootup.

[kumarvvr]

If the option can be enabled in the future, doesn't that mean the car is having the hardware in the seats? (Heating coils, or what have you).

Then, wouldn't that mean the customer is already paying for the hardware (cost of the car itself), and everything else is just greed?

[blabberwocky]

I think the distinction is semantic. The customer is paying for a feature set and usable spec which he receives. It’s not as if the customer pays some price expecting to use the heated seats and doesn’t get to do so.

There’s an argument that this unnecessarily reduces everyone’s fuel efficiency due to the greater weight of the hardware, etc., but again this is more or less already captured in the advertised spec.

[kumarvvr]

The function is as per spec.

But not the Bill of Materials, upon which the price is ultimately decided.

What I mean to say is that a customer who chooses a spec that does not include heated seats, is supplied and charged for hardware that is not required in the spec.

[rkachowski]

In addition to the cost of the energy required to actually heat the seats.

[headsoup]

This seems to imply that there would be some significant cost to BMW for implementing it, which is clearly not the case if it can be enabled on subscription.

Otherwise just make headlights an optional subscription too because they're only used occasionally...

[praptak]

Any physical device that you sold me I can use whenever and however I want. Offering this as a paid option is not enough.

[dncornholio]

> In any case, I see customer value

It costs BMW nothing to enable the heater. The heater is in your car and you cannot use it. Where is the added value for the customer exactly? If I don't want to use, you just don't turn it on. There is exactly 0 value for the customer here, and all the value to BMW.

[frereubu]

Fair point. But my concern about the "permanent" purchase would still be similar to "buying" a move on Amazon Prime. There's presumably still a mechanism for this to be rescinded somehow, whether through technical error, sunsetting the API that's used etc.

[regularfry]

If you think about how much functionality on a modern car depends on the legislative region it's sold in (which turns out to be quite a lot), the same is true for an awful lot of functionality in a modern car. Flip the wrong bit and you're not road-legal.