No thanks.
The latter option makes this seem more reasonable: after all, a car's ticket price has never included the 'extras' that come in the upsell. The difference-maker here is that BMW's cars are all perfectly capable of stuff such as Active Cruise Control, Adaptive M Suspension, Apple CarPlay, or BMW Drive Recording. It's just that now you need to pay for the software to unlock these features that are built into the car you've already bought.
Where exactly this is happening, outside of South Korea where it's launched, remains to be seen. The BMW UK store, for example, lists a variety of what BMW calls 'DriveConnected' features, including front seat heating , steering wheel heating , or the privilege of paying to have the on-board GPS map updated with new information.
The bigger argument here is whether companies should be able to sell products that have artificial locks on them. Any BMW car that these features can be bought for already has the hardware functionality: it just needs to be enabled by BMW software. BMW itself notes on the description for some of these features that"the hardware for this feature has already been installed in your vehicle during production, at no extra cost".
And a BMW is something with a huge ticket price in the first place. Watch the below video and tell me this is not a dystopia. Perhaps there's the rub. The kind of people who are buying new BMWs may not bat an eyelid at a few thousand pounds' extra to unlock various features, and that's the gamble the carmaker is taking. But if there's one thing for sure about microtransactions like this, it's that they devalue the feel of a given product. BMW is supposed to be an aspirational brand, something people daydream about owning. But who, really, wants a car that's got a car dealer built into it.
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