You wouldn't have been obligated, they were also going to offer it as a 1 time payment for the same price they've always charged for heated seats. But, the subscription option is the only thing that ever made the news.
yeah you'd be obligated if you wanted to use the seats. and there's no reason to defend the idea, it's not like they were doing anything other than try to make more money. Because it's not software that needs to be updated or anything. It's a straight up physical device that was sold as a subscription to make more money period.
> yeah you'd be obligated if you wanted to use the seats
Not true. You could pay once up front for the heated seat option, just like every year they offered heated seats as an option in the past. I'm not defending the subscription option, I agree the subscription option is silly.
This is assuming that the feature set of the car is free, and then you unlock features as you subscribe to them. I could be wrong, but BMW is probably not selling you the heated seats model at the same price as the base model(again, could be wrong here)!
If they were, its an interesting proposition...the heated seats are there but behind a paywall...I would say the long term economics of it probably don't favor the consumer given that BMW is doing this to make more money.