BMW owners will now have to pay extra for heated seats as the company starts selling it as a subscription in a number of countries.
The move is the latest example of the automaker adopting a subscription for high-end car features as reported by The Verge.
A monthly subscription to heat your BMW’s front seats will cost you £15, with options to subscribe for a year (£150), three years (£250) or pay for ‘unlimited’ access for £350.
The Front-seat heating feature is one of the many optional add-on software upgrades available in BMW’s ConnectedDrive stores in the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand and South Africa.
The features are offered through BMW’s ConnectedDrive Store which gives you the option of equipping your car with digital services and extending their subscriptions.
If driver and front passenger heat seating is available to you, the hardware for this feature has already been installed in your vehicle during production, at no extra cost.
The German carmaker has been putting features behind a paywall since 2020 when it announced that its cars’ operating system would allow for microtransactions on features like automatic high beams and adaptive cruise control. It’s a move that has not gone down well with customers who see it as greedy and exploitative.
With a price range of £27,245 to £67,810 with various extra charges for high-end features, implementing them as subscription services is a curious approach.
Especially since BMW cars already have all the necessary components which the company will now gatekeep using a software block that owners will have to pay to remove.
Me in my BMW in the winter after refusing to pay $18 a month for heated seats pic.twitter.com/CqaynZTbcP
People are understandably upset about this and many have taken to Twitter to express their displeasure.
One user pointed out that it wasn’t fair considering the hardware and electronics for heated seats were already in the car that you’d paid for.
‘BMW doesn’t expend materials and labor on spec. They are just charging extra to actually use them,’ they said.
Metro.co.uk has reached out to BMW for comment.
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