Great way to tank a brand. Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it, but having your car force ads on you is something people wouldn't even expect from a Kia Soul leased off a used lot.
Between this, the proprietary nut patent, and the heated seat subscription, I'm probably not going to look at BMW for my next car. They've been going back on things, but all of this adds up to they don't get it.
How can you put Ryanair and BMW in the same category?
Ryanair's whole shtick is "we'll treat you like cattle in a truck, and you'll be grateful you only paid €20 for the experience". I feel that anyone who is outraged by their nickel-and-diming doesn't really understand what Ryanair is about.
If I paid €200 for a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam, and they forced me to watch ads on the seatback screen and charged me to use the loo, then I'll be rightfully upset. But €50 for Ryanair? Where do I sign up for the €20 standing-only tickets?
The problem is a lot of people book Ryanair thinking they're going to save money and end up sucked in to these dark patterns.
I once flew from London Stansted (or maybe it was Luton?) to Dublin instead of from Heathrow with Aer Lingus to save a few bucks, and it never ended up saving me anything in the end.
With Aer Lingus the cheapest ticket includes 10kg of checked luggage, which is a nice middle ground between a tiny bag you can shove under your seat and a 23kg luggage
And Ryanair are not even cheaper most of the time unless you're prepared to fly at unsocialable times and forgo luggage.
Ryanair even seem to deliberately separate seats for adult passengers on the same booking so they can charge you extra to sit together...
Ryanair is the epitome of "cheap with compromise" which is the opposite of the BMW brand. And kindle basic gets advertising as a known feature at buying time.
Pushing advertisment after sale on a premium product is absolutely not similar.
I had to edit my comment saying it might not have been a fair comparison because I realized they might’ve just been dissing BMW pretty hard.
‘Enjoy your “luxury“ car’, the kind of “luxury“ that appeals to subsidized e-reader buyers and discount airline customers.
And I like that. If BMW can’t resist monetizing their customers’ attention, they don’t deserve the higher-end customers their marketing suggests they desire.
Ryanair: can’t recall if they’re worse than Spirit/Frontier. “We have one price for tiny people flying with the shirt on their back, and other prices for everyone else like those who might need luggage, or, liquid to survive.“
Are you including people who own older BMWs? They look like really great deals on the used market. Just don’t check the five-year total cost of ownership. If it’s not new, it’s gonna cost you in the shop. Maybe every year or so.
Also I think everyone in our social circles have flagship phones but $50 Android pre-paids sell pretty well. (Someone probably knows, unlike me, the exact numbers.)
Stellantis shows ads on their screens in-car. It’s expected behavior from an awful manufacturer like Stellantis, but I wouldn’t have expected this from BMW. It’s tacky and would turn me off from buying a BMW if I was looking at one.
I own a 2009 BMW twin turbo 3-series, purchased slightly used in early 2010 for $36k. The new price was $52k, so 10 months of depreciation really hits hard on new BMW buyers I guess.
The machine is a work of engineering art. It was made back in the days when BMW engineers were still given free rein to create The Ultimate Driving Machine. Remember that slogan? Back then, owning and driving a BMW was intentional. A driver's car. Design details down to things imperceptible were created with this intentional driver's desire to operate the vehicle. Sigh...
I feel sorry for the engineers that are still there from their glory days. Imagine being told from some power-suited punk to design that ad delivery mechanism.
What’s there to tank? Even Germans avoid BMW unless you are a drug dealer or six Syrian refugees throwing together to buy a car to flex with after the McDonalds shift.
I bought a Series 7 BMW once, went to Munich to pick it up with my GF, the electronics died three lights away from the factory. Just giving me a new one? Nope. Had to go home without a car.
I never heard anyone say, ‘Man, I’d not buy another brand than BMW again in my life.’
And I feel the people in the 21st century finally called the German engineering bluff and are now driving Chinese cars that are more innovative, a lot cheaper and basically German engineering too, after china stole all of the trade secrets.
- The Settings: Apple Intelligence and Apple Fitness+ (including the red dot as if you missed something important).
- The app store. Typically 1/2 or 2/3 of the search page is covered by ads.
- Apple Wallet. They rolled out an F1 advertisement to Apple Wallet in some region.
- iWork apps now have advertisements for updating to an Apple Creator Studio subscription.
- Apple Maps will soon have ads.
Most restraint is gone now to grow the Services category. It just feels gross for flagship devices. It seems that AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS are the only road to sanity.
That describes almost every major auto company though. Some companies sell their luxury lines through different badging or different branding but it's the same line up. Even Nissan has a luxury line. If you want a 500k BMW you can do that too.
I'm beginning to think that my '96 Toyota Starlet is "peak ICE". It has EFI, no infotainment, no power windows, no power steering, no automatic transmission. It is basically an engine, gearbox and wheels. An electric Starlet would be Nirvana.
Edit: Just read that Toyota is toying with the idea of an electric Starlet. It'll probably have an infotainment system and power "everything" though.
I'm not a mechanic but I have rebuilt an engine (common rail diesel with electronic injection) with a friend and do some work on my own cars. I don't really get the "everything needs to be mechanical" push. My previous car was mid 2000s, automatic, electronic basically everything. The reason why I scrapped it was because it had too must rust. The engine, transmission, and electronics were still fine after 200k and 20 years of harsh winters.
My current car had an electrical issue last year... but it turned out it was a mechanical issue. Something had chewed through the wires to the MAF sensor. Fixed them, and all good. It's no different from something chewing through a fuel line, except OBD was able to tell me what subsystem was not working correctly.
The problem I see with current cars is that the infotainment system is tied into everything - and usually the software sucks. If they just went back to seperate dashboard, AC controls and radio I'd have no issues with them.
My current car is from 2016, and I specifically looked for something that was like that. It is hybrid and has modern tech (e.g. radar cruise control), but everything is compartmentalised. First upgrade I did was replacing the headunit with a Chinese one that supports Android Auto/CarPlay. No functionality was lost, as the old head unit was literally just a radio and screen for backup camera.
The infotainment thing is regrettable but nowhere near as bad as the cellular modems phoning home, constantly spying, possibly raising your insurance rates…
Lucky for Big Brother they’ve blanketed this country (USA) in Flock cameras. New car, old car, they’re ready to pull over journalists in dealer loaners, people in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Electronic injection sounds like too complex system to maintain, now if it had an actual carburetor that might be a peak "ICE", true and pure mechanical experience. Jokes aside, I hope that car at least have airbags, otherwise it's just death trap
Sedan sales are tanking as a general concept. It’s not just the S class or E class. The sedan is a decreasingly popular form factor. I personally think this is quite logical: what’s the advantage of a sedan over a vehicle with a hatchback, whether it be SUV or car? It’s pretty much worse in every way. It’s just a smaller cargo opening.
The popularity of SUVs is incredibly logical given the fact that their downsides have been largely eliminated. They don’t chug gas anymore, they don’t ride like a truck anymore, again, where’s the downside? A sedan gives you a worse cargo space and more difficult entry/exit, lower view of the road, more annoying for car seats and kids, etc.
Mercedes is doing just fine selling SUVs.
This is a similar story to the death of the coupe and the manual transmission. There was a time when having two doors or manual transition cut down on labor and manufacturing costs significantly and they were sensible compromises for customers. It’s just not true anymore, and what you’re left with is a typical non-enthusiast buyer that says “why would I want a car with less functionality/is harder to drive?”
It’s easy to criticize about M or AMG being watered down but they have a pretty distinctive product separation between the true performance models and sport trims.
And to be honest, the sport trims are much more sensible purchases for most buyers than a full blown M/AMG vehicle with all the sticker price, fuel economy and maintenance baggage they entail.
Why 2025 though? It didn't yet pass the test of time and there is not enough failure rate data on it. Toyotas(Lexus) do have serious quality issues too, rarely but that happens for certain models from time to time.
Just saying that these brands have different offerings in different countries. Here in Germany all big brands: Audi, BMW, Mercedes and VW etc have offerings from low lever to luxury car.
The most evil part of this is that drivers have been conditioned to click on these “surprise waiting for you” notifications. BMW usually had fairly cute holiday animations that were a fun surprise. I actually looked forward to them until I got bamboozled by this one…
Correct. This is about the people who buy new cars. The manufacturers are addressing a well-studied market. Those with money, those who can afford to be "early adopters' of new tech are the sort of people who actually want these features. They want computer screens. They want car-phone synchronization. They want a car that can be "repaired" over an internet connection because that saves interacting with a tradesperson with skills they do not understand or appreciate. Cars are scary for such people. Phones are not. So making the car as phone-like as possible sells more cars.
I agree that it’s abhorrent. However the doomer in me can’t help but think they do these things because consumers still buy them. You’d expect GE to go “Oh yeah well we don’t put ads on OUR fridges.” but it seems like in every industry they all just follow suit.
A fridge is one of these devices where I wouldn't know why I would even want a screen. So, I would never buy a fridge with a screen or a washing machine/dryer with anything more than a simple segmented LCD.
For me the biggest annoyance are pushing ads (and the pervasive monitoring that comes with it) to devices where screens are integral to the device and therefore unavoidable, like TVs, smartphones, computer displays, etc. We haven't connected our TV to WiFi (like any TV nowadays you have to be very careful that it doesn't enable a service like Samba that screenshots what you are viewing), but I'm sure these people will do anything to get their hands on analytics and screen time by embedding cellular modems and whatnot.
Similarly, at least on Android phones, you can git of a lot of crap with adb. But Android 17 removes the possibility to uninstall apps from the 'user partition' (you can only disable), I wouldn't be surprised if they also remove disabling in the future, so there will be no way to get rid of all the spyware and crap ware. Yes, alternative ROMs do not have this issue, but they get increasingly blocked out with Play Integrity.
It's not like they're showing ads on fridges/cars in the commercials or the display units in Lowe's/the dealership. By the time you see the ad, it's too much of a hassle to return it, even if you can...
On my Samsung TV recently on the start page some ad has started to show up, years after I bought it. No idea if I can get rid of it. I barely watch TV though, so I don't really care about wasting time trying to get rid of it. But I will for sure avoid Samsung in future TV purchases.
At this point, the current BMW has to die and reinvent themselves in a fundamentally better way. Breaks my heart as longtime BMW fan and previous owner of some older models. What have they done to the DNA of that company...
It sounds awful, but it might not even make the top-5 of the most annoying/concering things you'll get in a new car (bought in the EU at least), many of which are now mandatory by regulation. What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road, an alarm when you drive over the allowed speed limit as determined by a camera, an alarm plus a mechanical yanking of your driving wheel when you're approaching the side of your lane without a turn signal on. As a cherry on top it's unclear what happens with all the data generated by these systems. And I'm probably forgetting a few.
I'm wondering what a good cutoff date is when considering buying a used car.
Those things are at least well intentioned, and honestly the lane keeping has once or twice saved me from accidentally leaving my lane when distracted, which might have saved my life.
An ad for a spiderman movie has no upside and is another small step towards a Minority Report vision of the future.
I haven't driven a recent model but afaik the answer for most is Yes, or at best you can disable them for the current ride and they turn on again automatically on every start.
That's quite insane then. Especially the lane departure warning / assist was downright dangerous in snowy conditions when the road markings became partially covered, I cannot imagine driving with that setting on all the time.
I've never had a point where it is dangerous. It vibrates the steering wheel and that's it. Even on the autobahn's 2.20m wide roadwork left lanes it works good/not bad enough I just leave it on. Lane keeping is not mandatory, only a warning system.
> Especially the lane departure ... assist was downright dangerous in snowy conditions
And near cyclists...
(Opposite to some configurations described nearby, some car models do automatically steer pushing the car in its lane, they do not just warn the driver.)
We have a car with lane assist. But as far as I have seen (but can be mistaken), collision avoidance has a higher priority, so it would prefer avoiding a cyclist ov er staying in lane (though if the road is small, it might just start breaking).
What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road
Coming to you thanks to the assholes who fiddle on their phone while driving. As a cyclist, I still see this happening regularly where car drivers are fiddling on their phone while driving for just a few seconds, leading to almost-collisions (well, probably I've been lucky to only witness almost-collisions, including almost getting hit myself), etc.
Same problem on bikes and electric bikes. People are so attached to their screens that they are fiddling on their phone while cycling. This was already bad when people cycled 15 km/h on a regular bike, but now we have kids who cycle on a fat bike with the 25 km/h speed limit removed, tinkering on their phone while cycling 35 km/h in small city streets. Not surprisingly, accidents have gone up a lot.
I hate in-car cameras as much as you. But I also hate the totally irresponsible use of phones while driving/cycling.
The eu has started pushing those things with a 2016 (I believe) regulation that imposed "all cars approved for production after 2018 must have an "e-Call" system (internal GPS, microphone and telephone connected to the police in case of car crash)".
Same in my car from 2017. Also has rear camera, no infotainment other than bluetooth (so I guess it doesn't have any telemetry), physical buttons, no internal nav, no EU warning systems, no alerts that I need to turn off. Perfect car. Very peaceful to drive.
These systems are such a pain in the butt. These can’t be saving lives. My brain completely filters away the speed limit beep. The auto-steering mostly tries to drive me into other vehicles (in the countryside it steers you towards the middle of the road ). And I am pretty sure the eye tracking thing wont prevent me from selecting a spotify song.
cutoff is officially mid 2024. I don’t know if some older cars have been firmware-updated to have these features turned on by default.
Wouldn't it be fair if BMW at least shared the advertisement revenue with the car owners?
It's so ugly that they first sell cars, and profit from that. And then they utilize the fleet of cars to squeeze out more revenue, even though that was never part of the contract to begin with. What right does BMW have to do that?
If they found a new revenue source, it would be nice if they at least shared that with their customers. Now it's just abuse of their customers. Where BMW is one-sided profiting while the customers are suffering.
I mean, I don't know of it's still around, but the ad-supported Amazon Kindle was at least cheaper than the regular version. So the customer got some compensation for being shown ads.
The main story in the wiki page comes from the Autopian [0], specifically from Jason Torchinsky, ex Jalopnik. It's an awesome publication, check them out, and Jason is an incredible writer (Onion alumni)
This looks like it, possibly. There doesn't seem to be a banner that you click on like it states in the consumer rights article, but rather an icon, so not sure.
BMWs have decent 'mod' support, if you fully own a msport/M you can be mitigating OTA updates in firmware to retain your perf/exhaust pops as regulations/OEMs change goals. Original firmware b58s (m340/z4m40) are infamously coveted for specific software/hardware versions... Same logic can be applied to this strange advert thingy
Focusing on US, not EU: Had a 2020 m340i delivered pre2020 so lived through this. The niche market also understands this, C3 made a full breakdown presentation for the Volkswagen scandal (https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...) that makes your first point moot.
Hopefully their lawyers have considered the possibility of a bug causing this ad to play while the car is being driven and leading to a distracted driving accident...
on suitably equipped vehicles running BMW Operating System 7, 8, 8.5, 9, or OS X built after July 2020
For those who were surprised by that naming, Apple hasn't used "OS X" for nearly 10 years.
You are being sarcastic, right? We have been seeing this coming for a very long time, in the order of ten years. Spoken with car makers employees: "people ask for that". So: what do you mean.
A month ago the highly upvoted blog entry [0] about Rivian’s rejection of CarPlay included this quote from Rivian’s Chief Software Officer, Wassym Bensaid:
The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.
Yes, it’s clear the companies’ see the way they want to “interact” with their customers is to force whatever content they please.
Went to an official repairs shop for a device yesterday, said I had a backup device with a malfunctioning (for clinical reasons) OS. The technician replied that OS downgrade is inhibited.
And there are similarities. For example, after laws that forbid circulation of older vehicles upon "non-ecological" reasons. For example, if they stop producing replacement parts. Etc.
And anyway, if the basis of Economics is not rebuilt, that of a "violent" Demand side with a strong refusal against the Supply side, the damage will be even more than the already critical one of unacceptable products eating u the market.
> Clicking on it then activates the Spider-Man™ animation, comprising a full-screen festive animation in the Control Display with aptly chosen backing music and an accompanying light show courtesy of the ambient lighting system.
Stop the presses, it's not an ad, it's just a “festive animation”!
One of the best things one of me mates from high school did for me, is buy himself a BMW. The amount of problems and money he had to deal with helped me realize I didn't actually want a BMW, they're just nice to look at.
Only the older ones without screens. A naturally aspirated inline 6 with a manual gearbox and 50/50 weight distribution is it's own special kind of bliss.
I only take it out maybe 20 times per year, but after merely 30s behind the wheel I remember why I keep it.
they were nice to look at before they hired some military tank designer
and even looking at them is safe only seen they are parked, I warned my kids to be extra vigilant when they are nearby BMW on the road, by far the most dangerous drivers on the road with mental issues
this is what you get for buying cheap noname brand car from Temu
similar thing happened with that British LGBT brand, which is gone
though it's clear people who buy BMW are not mentally sane anyway, I'm yet to see BMW driver with stable personality who would not vent their mental issues on the road, these people will buy BMW with literally any design and specs just because it's BMW, no matter it looks like ugly tank
I honestly believe if we banned BMW car registrations number of accidents would drop much more than it's their total share on registrations.
yes, these are data from Czechia in 2022, TOP10 (it's percentage share of accidents per operated/registered cars, it doesn't take into consideration km travelled though which would eliminate all the trucks immediately with their yearly mileage):
1. DAF 4,67%
2. MAN 3,60%
3. Iveco 2,99%
4. Mercedes-Benz 1,53%
5. Volvo 1,34%
6. BMW 1,04%
7. Audi 1,02%
8. Fiat 0,89%
9. Renault 0,86%
10. Volkswagen 0,83%
Guess which of these brands doesn't sell trucks (just a little bit hint - Mercedes and Volvo sell a lot of trucks in Europe) and you will get number one among passenger cars from one brand which doesn't sell trucks and cause the most accidents followed unsurprisingly by Audi.
different chart from 2025 from CEBIA in Czechia, company checking whether car was crashed and their findings, percentage of cars they were checking and which actually crashed, though this one just says percentage out of verified cars, it must be noted that Skoda/Toyota are extremely popular in Czechia, so they are also more likely to have accidents: