[helterskelter]

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.

[dehrmann]

It's like a basic Kindle. Or Ryanair.

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.

[beAbU]

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?

[nly]

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...

[riffraff]

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.

[Barbing]

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.

[dylan604]

Which was the straw that broke the camel's back to cancel Prime

[Barbing]

>basic Kindle

Praise be to AdBreak https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/AdBreak

I practically own it now!

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.“

[2muchcoffeeman]

A BMW is like a flagship smart phone. It looks like luxury, but everyone has them.

[Barbing]

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.)

[ponector]

Because it's a premium product, not a luxury.

[mplewis]

No, it's obviously not like that.

[quickthrowman]

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.

[ThomasServo]

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...

Now, it's apparently...The Ultimate Consumer Advertising Content Delivery System.

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.

[Jamesbeam]

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.

[rvz]

> Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it

BMWs are no where near for that "class". A Mercedes-Benz is for that and even they also put ads in their own dashboard screens. [0]

So on HN-land, time to rule out BMWs, Chevrolets, Mercedes-Benz, Teslas, Volkswagens, Kias. What else?

[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/797846/mercedes-screen-plays-ads...

[ehnto]

Mercs and BMWs occupy the same market space. They are direct competitors.

Mercedes may have a car or two that reaches just out of upper middle class but they are largely a middle to upper middle class brand, just like BMW.

The fact that Merc would do it too just means they are both happy cheapening their brand to align with practices of cheap off-brand android TVs.

[dash2]

Actually Apple will also put advertising on your phone if you have one of the dynamic carousel things and you walk into the wrong area.

[microtonal]

They put advertising in:

- 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.

[eps]

Mercedes is famously a company with the widest range of models, from entry-level budget cars to high-end luxury ones. It's basically their MO.

[ehnto]

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.

[jchw]

I don't think I'll be buying recent model years any time soon.

[femto]

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.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/2026-toyota-starlet-rumours/

[fy20]

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.

[Barbing]

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…

[merpkz]

What stops your navigation app on phone collecting all the data anyways and sharing it with insurance corps?

[Dylan16807]

Not having a screen is great, but I don't think you're going to convince many people that lack of power steering is a feature.

[merpkz]

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

[yegle]

Volvo, with their terrible infortainment system's performance, I'm not sure if it's capable of displaying ads.

[dylan604]

And here you thought they were just incompetent. Turns out, they've been looking out for you this whole time

[kridsdale1]

My Lexus 2025 remains perfect and user friendly. I have all the online connected stuff enabled. Zero enshitification.

[maxnevermind]

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.

[quickthrowman]

Toyota is the least objectionable car manufacturer and used vehicle deprecation curves don’t lie, I trust money decisions more than words.

As long as they keep annoying ads and subscriptions out of their vehicles, I’ll keep driving them.

[mentalfist]

Many NA produced lexus models have seen deteriorating quality issues past 5 or so years. Maybe yours is produced in Japan?

[ludicrousdispla]

>> Zero enshitification.

Lexus should put that on the cover of their product brochure.

[roundwego]

Lexus is a kino sleeper.

[mlrtime]

Mercedes used to be that. The S class used to be the best car you could buy.

The S class sales are tanking as well as E class and the rest of their cars are just toyota corolla class with extra "luxury" features.

AMG used to actually mean something, now AMG badging is a feature that means nothing (Like M cars).

[Grombobulous]

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.

[larusso]

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.

[chaostheory]

You make it sound like there's no choice. Toyota/Lexus and Honda/Acura don't do it to my knowledge. Am I wrong?

EDIT Add Volvo and Genesis to the list of no ads

[dzhiurgis]

It’s not forced. You have to click icon. Not the smartest move, but not exactly ominous. Plenty of other bad software decisions in bmw.

[jtokoph]

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…

[Barbing]

Sounds like it is forced and it’s an entire banner. Imagine the click-through rate on something your car shows you compared to your average ad.

[calmbonsai]

Yup. I'd say ICE cars peaked in UX, performance, and safety in the early 2000s.

[vardump]

The current crop of cars are significantly safer than in early 2000s.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

This has nothing to do with the method used to propel the vehicle. There's nothing stopping this from happening in an EV.

[sandworm101]

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.

[edoceo]

The electric motor is better for torque and speed than ICE.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

And this effects how ads are displayed on the main console how?