Technology

Man, never thought I'd see the day that after market car crackz become an industry.

Bmw slowly becoming a really bad car

"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.

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.

When I said I wanted Forza in the car this isn't exactly what I was gaming for.

You wouldn't download a Car.

Yes. Yes I would.

I actually think this is a great idea. Hear me out.

They fit the hardware that you can't touch while the Motor plan is active, but when the right to repair legislation kicks in, and we start debating whether we actually own the cars we buy, all these scumbag practices will mean that any car outside of the Motorplan should be able to run cracked OS's and everyone gets free BMW features on their cars after motorplan expires.

I vote they keep going for a bit, then they get their asses handed to them with out of maintenance plan service options and 3rd party features.

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.

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

We start again with a strange Germany in Europe:)

Germany; don't do this please...

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.

I can easily foresee the drm services or servers being shutdown, like the Microsoft music server....most you bought can no longer be used if moved.

Eventually they will "retire" this model and shut down servers. Making the car maybe driveable, but won't have stuff you paid for I bet.

Plus, eventually someone will unlock this with a hacked car software patch anyway.