At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car. Not a supercar, but beyond the reach of most of the car-buying public. I'm surprised that the generally quite wealthy owners of those cars would tolerate that.
It suggests that BMW must be in dire financial straits somehow, and I’ve been trying to decide why. Current theory is that it’s part ‘BMW needs to prop up their share price with a steroid injection of ads into their growth in growth of profit curve’, and part ‘BMW lost the evaporating upper middle class segment and is on the verge of collapse’
It’s such a look of desperation to add advertisements when they didn’t start out as a carnival-barker brand that it’s hard to continue trusting their vehicle manufacturing. Look at how poorly they rank in reliability perception relative to Jaguar and Subaru — and only two steps away from ‘We’re selling your radio data to stay afloat’ GM, too?! https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/06/29/2025-jd-power-initial-qua...
Ugh. I may not personally like their cars but I still hate to see it when notable brands swan-dive into the rocks rather than just wind down gracefully. Hopefully Toyota handles this better, given they’re facing a financial engineering crisis of their own with operating profits down to a mere 2.5% of sales: https://www.toyota-industries.com/investors/item/2025_annual... anyways
> Sato has claimed Toyota is in a “battle for survival” against Chinese automakers. Going forward, the company will have to loosen its infamously strict quality standards to cut costs and increase output.
Many car companies have managed to fail and cease operations without destroying their brand with, as the article title describes it, “showing commercials on their car’s dash screens”. While I agree that they’re as greedy and shitty as the other companies — though GM and Rivian have them beat on that for denying CarPlay over its data processing protections! — it’s too early to identify which brands will next self-immolate with video ads like this.
It’s infuriating to see that if Toyota would just stop trying so hard to sell cars, they wouldn’t be at risk of this. Something like 90% of their sales profits on a 25% markup from production cost are spent on marketing to get each sale?! That reeks of the same kind of desperation to show growth in growth of profits that BMW is showing, so they’re definitely in the at-risk category now.
Mozilla is right to level criticism, regardless of hypocrisy.
The internal debate around the Mr. Robot events was even more fiery than the public reaction, and while the Corporation has busily continued enshittifying, that does not excuse dismissing the Foundation’s critique of auto manufacturers. You’re not only confusing two entirely separate business entities that are formally operated apart from each other, that would risk 501(c)(3) revocation if they fail to maintain that chasm — you’re discrediting a serious and real breakdown of privacy violations on the grounds of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy does not invalidate legitimate objections. It could, if these had been the same organization as you assumed, invalidate the stated and unstated motivations driving publication. Concrete facts and negative reviews present by an unpalatable and biased source may still be accurate and relevant. What motivation did you consider suspect here, and why do you feel should invalidated their claims regarding auto manufacturers? You could well be right, after all, and I’d rather consider your full viewpoint than dismiss it for being incomplete.
I don't know. I think the goalpost is constantly being moved as to what is acceptable, and they're just trying to squeeze out more revenue per car sold.
And what better way to do so by using this large space in a car?
Thank God they downloaded it over their own 4G connection, not the one I pay for (yes I got the message this morning in my iDrive 7 car...).
Choosing to move that particular goalpost suggests financial problems, though. If they were making excellent cars and a reliable profit growth at the same rate as a growing U.S. upper middle class population, then they’d be completely set for life and would never have had to stoop to this. What isn’t clear yet is whether their apparent failure is rooted in macroeconomic, manufacturing, and/or operations — but choosing the “race to the bottom” indicates they are no longer a luxury brand, and that’s their golden goose killed and eaten for a promo. Look to the absolute wreckage done to the Firefox brand solely by the Mr. Robot promo, as an HN-recognized example in a more familiar industry, and that destruction was to a free brand!
> More importantly, these advertising anti-features gravely - perhaps terminally - violate user trust. This event tells us that “Firefox studies” into a backdoor for advertisements, and I will never trust it again. But it doesn’t matter - you’re going to re-enable it on the next update. You know what that means? I will never trust Firefox again.
> At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car.
No they most definitely are not.
They're marketed as high end, but their engineering is a tour de force of cost cutting behind the scenes.
I just got rid of my 2024 BMW i4 xdrive40, for an electric awd subaru-toyota-lexus joint effort platform (there are a few variations, all related in engineering) and it's like jumping several years into the future, including efficiency, which is roughly 25% higher in the japanese (more modern) cars, the handling dynamics on the japanese platforms are far more refined, and then vastly less shitty interior materials, except the BMW seating which was good.
I've driven BMW "high end cars" for about 11 years, and emphatically recommend looking at Audi, Mercedes, and Subaru/Toyota joint efforts, as well as Tesla and Rivian, depending on what you seek.
$0.02 from someone who spent a fortune and lived and learned.
that's what i refer to by the marketing...and it carries indeed over into the pricing, and carries over into the insurance rates to repair at such pricings.
If you think like that then what makes a car luxury is not whether it's a good car, not whether it's comfortable, not anything at all about the car.
This reasoning makes the price it's own argument. It's supposed to be good because it's expensive and only because it's expensive. The car itself is beside the point (and the car's quality will of course soon be sacrificed by management to the insatiable gods of profit)
Skoda seem to have a small budget, perhaps $5/car, to add features in. Nothing major: an ice scraper / tread depth gauge under the fuel cap; a parking ticket clip on the side of the windscreen - that sort of thing. It tends to be disproportionately popular with owners.
When I bought the X5, I tried all sorts of other comparable models, both higher and lower price/quality.
I thought Lexus SUVs drove like 1990's era Mercury Grand Marquis -- "refined" is one way of putting it. Mazda claims their cars are solid handlers but my experience with three of them is, well, meh - very model dependent. Volvo SUV handling - refined, but the vehicles feel large.
Long way of saying - I feel when driving BMWs that they drive as the brand describes them: the ultimate driving machine. Refined is not the first word that comes to mind, but not far down the list.
2026 i4 is awesome. I won't argue the range. Pretty pathetic but that car isn't my range warrior anyways.
that's identical to my 2024 i4 xdrive40 (there's no i), _except_ the entire batch of i4 (i5,i7) built from late summer 2023 to early 2024 had faulty heat pump valve subsystems from Vitesco (subsidieary of Continental) and were basically all lemons. BMW never owed up or did a recall, but did multiple replacements of the subsystem until the cars stopped failing.
your 2026 is two years newer by model year than my 2024, so perhaps you've got a corrected design, as it happened after the model refresh in 2025.
I don’t think is fair to compare Asian and German cars. I personally dislike Asian designs regardless of how reliable and efficient they are. Subarus are objectively ugly cars and they are not great as daily drivers. Lexus offer a closer driving experience as German cars, meaning you can have both a sporty and family car without the annoyance of a sport ride and noise of a WRX. But is still very Asian looking with the sharp angles, ugly headlights and large grills.
If you are looking for luxury performance and can’t afford a Porsche or Ferrari but don’t want to look on a budget driving an Atlas or a Genesis then you only have BMW, Audi and Benz. The latter usually doesn’t appeal to under 60 except for AMG which is out of budget, so your decision always ends between Audi and BMW. They offer a different driving experience IMO, so if you are a beemer guy ads won’t deter you from buying one.
It’s such a look of desperation to add advertisements when they didn’t start out as a carnival-barker brand that it’s hard to continue trusting their vehicle manufacturing. Look at how poorly they rank in reliability perception relative to Jaguar and Subaru — and only two steps away from ‘We’re selling your radio data to stay afloat’ GM, too?! https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/06/29/2025-jd-power-initial-qua...
Ugh. I may not personally like their cars but I still hate to see it when notable brands swan-dive into the rocks rather than just wind down gracefully. Hopefully Toyota handles this better, given they’re facing a financial engineering crisis of their own with operating profits down to a mere 2.5% of sales: https://www.toyota-industries.com/investors/item/2025_annual... anyways
> Sato has claimed Toyota is in a “battle for survival” against Chinese automakers. Going forward, the company will have to loosen its infamously strict quality standards to cut costs and increase output.
— https://www.autonocion.com/us/toyota-crisis-chinese-evs/