Oh look, another reason not to buy BMW, I'll just add it to the other 456788656752 reasons.

If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.

Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they'll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they'll all follow.

We are pirating car suspension now holy shit

Next up, Anti-lock brakes as a Subscription Service. ASS.

Haha.. connection to server cannot be established. Suspension resetting to default.

This is extra hilarious in the face of the crib manufacturer that just decided to subscription paywall basic functions of their crib.. or the slow cooker... And that's just this week.

Game manufacturers pulling the plug on games they sold removing the servers yanking the games.

And now people think that you can buy a product that is going to last longer and costs several orders of magnitude more.. and you can only hope that the manufacturer can be bothered to:

1. Keep the service safe and secure.
2. Have it be reliable.
3. Maintain it operational for the actual lifespan of the car (not some MBA's definition of economic lifespan or something).
4. Not fuck with you on the price. (We're not shutting down the servers, but the price will be 50 a month and 5 euros per adjustment).

But the sale case is easy.. lease car drivers. This way they can enjoy premium functions not incorporated into the sale price of the car. I hope the IRS that taxes these things sees through this ploy and taxes the vehicles for installed functions wether you pay for them or not. Saw this happen with Tesla's.. taxed based on their initial price.. and then the user added 15k of functions after a day.. and the tax was still based on the original sticker price.

In theory most subscription services provide additional content as time goes on. This only provides a capability that already exists on the car.

Got it, don't buy cars built after 2010.

Well done BMW. Anything that leads to more people cycling instead of driving is a good thing in my book.

Anyone that buys a car that has shit like this is a fool.

These cars already cost more than my life, how can they ask for more money.

"The pressure eased off a little when they ended subscriptions tied to heated seats, but the Internet rage machine has come back for vengeance."

lol. It's not vengeance or rage, its simply the fact that making someone pay for something they already own is dumb.

You know it's just a matter of time before this shit starts being applied to budget cars.

...I really hope the tech crowd is working on jailbreaking this garbage.

FUCK these out of control capitalists jesus christ.

Why is this bad in a nutshell.

A) The only way to control access to this feature is to lock down and phone home. If it doesn't phone home then when someone figures out a way around your present security its possible for someone to sell said features forever. Such DRM could hurt repeatability by accident or more likely on purpose.

B) There is no reason to fail open so even if BMW is still chugging when they stop taking your cars phone calls and retires those servers you get no more feature.

C) The amount spent over the lifespan of a car wherein people opt to take care of their valuable asset absolutely dwarfs the cost able to be extracted up front

D) This functionality opens the door to a hacker not just turning off your features but turning off your car. This includes state sponsored attackers and people who are just generally pissed off at the geopolitical actions of your country of origin. If you are in the US that is a lot of fucking people.

E) Product segmentation on average increases the amount you can extract per user. Allowing segmentation by features turn on or off in software by the month it allows far greater segmentation with no reasonable expectation that the baseline will be lower. This means the lowest end user of a model pays the same for even less. The median user pays somewhat more and the max user pays a LOT more.

F) This means wholly paid for used cars now come with a car payment to the manufacturer.

Now there are half a hundred people on the boards of these companies and 338M of us in the US. 449M in the EU. There is no reason to allow this misfeature to continue to be a thing in our markets. If automakers don't like those restrictions any one of them can opt to most of the most valuable markets in the world and find their fortunes exclusively in China while their competitors eat their former marketshare.

In what way does the suspension require regular servicing or an online connection to a server to function? That would be the only reason to offer it as an ongoing service cost.

Otherwise, you're just paying extra for something already in your car, not for an actual service, which would make no sense?

What next, paint ongoing service fees for having wheels? Not even for ensuring they're regularly replaced, serviced, or repaired, just for the ability to use them at all....

“We’re pivoting from serving peasants to fleecing rich dumbasses that subscribe and pay monthly fees for features built into the car.”

And they’ll make money doing it. Because there will never be a shortage of people with more money than sense.

When you need fitgirl to help you with your car.

They tried this with heated seats and no one wanted it, what made them think would we accept this?

German car makers have become such a joke in the last decade...

The level of subscriptions has become insane

They would make turn signals a subscription service but they won't ever get any money from that.

I'd hoped that BMW (and the rest of the automotive industry) would have learned from the subscription heated seats debacle.

Oh well, no Beemers for me.

This is why I don't mourn Western car companies getting slaughtered by Chinese EVs. They can't really provide value by nickel and diming customers with subscriptions for components already installed on their privacy-invading overpriced cars.

You wouldn't download a Car.

Yes. Yes I would.

Should be a nottheonion article

I’m never buying a BMW again. I had an electric i3 which had an inverter (charger) failure. BMW wanted €12k to fix it. Thankfully an independent offered to do it for 4K. But BMW still wanted 3K just to plug it in and authenticate the new block. Nothing else, just “bless” it. Made the fix cost-prohibitive so we just had to scrap the car. The battery, which most people fear, was fine on this 8 year old car.

So you purchase ordinary suspension but get active suspension that works exactly like ordinary suspension and cost like active suspension to service....

It's time we get legislation that gives the consumer access to all encryption key pairs used in the product they purchased.

(For you who don't know what encryption key pairs are used for: they are used for the software to know that a change order, like "activate suspension", is legit and therefore will be executed.)

Imagine suffering an accident and having to pay a plus because of a feature you can't even use on the parts you replace. I feel this is non-competitive bullshit that is following the trend Elon Musk started, although it probably started much earlier.

We need a FOSS car....

Thanks, I gladly stick with my old non-BMW car!