Are we sure they didn’t just put the controls on the turn signal lever?
Drove BMW my whole life and the brand no longer makes cars for people who like driving. Hard to imagine this is the company that made the e46 m3.
Coming up to 10 years of ownership on my 335i and it will be my final BMW. They literally don’t even make a car that is more fun than my clapped out 335. Pathetic. It’s all touch screens and electronic steering and shit that car enthusiasts despise.
Porsche is the only company still making good cars. Unfortunately that is also reflected in their prices.
My friend’s dad has an m235, maybe 4-5 years old now? You can’t hear the exhaust without the windows down and it’s got fake gurgles anyway, the shift throw is a mile long, and the clutch feels fucking awful. It’s fast but you can’t really feel it, not to the degree you would expect to anyway.
Meanwhile my 2015 BRZ shifter, especially with a heavier shift knob, feels awesome. Pulled the “assist” spring off the clutch pedal and now it’s perfectly linear. Maybe you could do the same to the BMW but it wouldn’t fix the throw length. The car’s not fast, but it’s not slow and at least I can feel and hear it.
If you want a good car, buy a Subaru. The BRZs are incredible and the WRX, even the new ones though I do have criticisms, are pretty slick.
Dont like wrx’s?
Now we all know that if we see someone in a BMW at a traffic light who looks particularly comfortable, that person is an idiot.
This is a terrible article. It didn’t give a single example. It also said there is subscriptions for things that need a constant connection. The connected drive stuff currently are things anyone can do without. This is very rage baity.
Considering I’d never buy one, great! I couldn’t care less.
Every upgrade in John Deere equipment of the same model is installed on every unit sold, just unplugged, because it’s cheaper to have the same build process.
School bus transmissions have been like this for over 25 years. They’re all built with 6 gears but if you only want 5 gears (which is ironically is all most school districts actually want) they just disable 6th gear. It used to be that there was a little bit of missing hardware (which could be added later for a considerable price) but now it’s just disabled in software. In the skoolie community (people like me who buy used buses and convert them to motorhomes) you can get your software-disabled transmission upgraded to a six-speed for a few hundred bucks (dubious legality but who gives a fuck).
Time to hack some John Deere hardware, I suppose.
Ukrainian hackers have been doing custom John Deere firmware for ages I believe.
Slava Ukrani!
yo fuck john deere pass it on
is that why they never use turn signals? you need a subscription?
No, it’s because the peasants don’t need to know where I am going.
You joke but I actually had a co-worker once tell me that “I’m an adult, I don’t need to tell others where I am going.”
The assumption is that every peasant on the road will stop, move out if their way and politely greet them because of the higher BMW status. Just as they in turn have to defer to a Bentley or Rolls Royce. The hierarchy of cars.
It’s funny, because a boy I used to work with in a major UK city centre with lots of traffic congestion used to say “go for the gap in front of the ones with a nice car, they’ll stop”.
In the same vein, never let them out of a junction out of politeness. They have enough privilege in their life, they can wait.
Banged up Corsa? Out you come, you’ve places to go.
Boring Ford Mondeo? Sure, I’ll be nice.
Land Rover Evoque Sport? Get fucked, I’ve got right of way.
I think having an Evoque is punishment enough, it’s officially the worst LR product lol
Well, RR is now BMW, so that tracks. Bentley’s are just an overpriced VW, so just another peasant.
The only BMW drivers I’ve known are crack or meth dealers. Not the best judgment and expect everyone to bend to their will like the addicts they sell their crap too.
Yeah, BMW are for drug dealers and Mercedes are for pimps, lol.
We have those too, but they mostly stay in one part of the city. And there are some race freaks. But mostly BMW is a very common company car.
So how does the car know if your subscription is valid?
Is it going to be like Microsoft when every so often your subscription is a deactivated until you can validate it again?
So your car will need to have constant connectivity to wifi or at least reconnect each day/week/month to confirm the subscriptions are still active?
Nah, they have a cellular data connection.
It pays for itself, because the car manufacturer can sell the driving data to insurance companies.
And now it’s used to make sure your brakes subscription is up to dateYup and Toyota and all the other major companies have been selling your data since 2018. Some even earlier.
Most BMW drivers lease vehicles so they’re already used to what amounts to subscription. My fear is that these news articles are actually designed to normalize this to buyers of brands where leasing isn’t the default. They show how the affluent don’t mind paying to convince the less fortunate it’s a glamorous move.
Hell, based on recent approaches, these articles might primarily to help train LLMs to talk “the right way” about this stuff.
oh yes, surely that idea helps them compete with Chinese cars, this is what they are going to add value to and justify their price
It lowers the upfront cost which is what millions of financially illiterate people think of first. $299 biweekly for 96 months! That’s $20 cheaper than XYZ
Never you mind how much extra it costs for radio or heated seats or the horsepower on the sticker.
$600 a month for 8 years. For a car. Plus a $99 subscription on top.
JFC
I’m with this guy
Insane economics.
What’s the saying? Only poor people can afford “cheap” shoes? (Though cheap at $600/month is doing a lot of work there)
Fuck that.
Gimme that indestructible Japanese shitox any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
It won’t work for so many millions when Chinese cars are skyrocketing, competing on price with them is crazy. Combustion engines require advanced engineering, but electric ones are absolutely basic, we must look for another element that differentiates these brands, I would pay more for good open source and auditable privacy software that I know is not going to leave me stranded at the first opportunity.
The problem is that not enough people care about privacy, but it’s a valid approach. Just need to market it.
One of the challenges I think are the things you can’t notice until you live with a car. How much space does the seat heater actually heat? My old BMW heated quite far up the backrest while Japanese and Korean cars barely warm the lumbar area (and cycle on/off leaving you hot/cold respectively).
How good is the traction control? I have driven GM products shipped on this side of 2020 that only do torque limiting and the abs doesn’t seem to do pay any attention to the rear wheels. The system is very similar to 1980s functionality. Compared to a 2000s smart car, it’s downright dangerous. Does the HVAC work? I’ve had a Subaru (2014) that couldn’t heat or couldn’t cool the car, without having the fans on above normal speaking level (in fact it couldn’t cool the car at 25°C without recirculate on); my BMW on the other hand moderated heat output, heated seats, and heated mirrors based on the outdoor temperature; it was exceedingly comfortable. I never needed to adjust the climate controls.The cheaper cars have the “features” but the implementation is crappy. It costs money to finesse.
The problem is that most people (as with privacy) don’t notice this. They may note the absence of the small luxuries if they change cars, but it’s difficult to market it, difficult to convince people to spend more on it, and difficult to include in press reviews without being a huge nerd.
If it’s already built into the car the car won’t be any less expensive just because the features is locked behind a subscription.
Even if you don’t buy the subscription, you already payed for the feature since they already built it into your car. They didn’t do that for free and hope that you pay for it later.It’s a lot cheaper for OEMs to just manufacture one SKU (a car with all the hardware) than to have a bunch of different options. Now, wether or not they pass those savings to the consumer, I have my doubts
Totally depends on the part
They didn’t do that for free and hope that you pay for it later.
That is, in fact, the business model.
Cars already are wired for many features or have software gates on them. For decades now, they’ll run the wire for a rain sensor but not include the sensor, because it’s more expensive to have two parts for the harness than to not hook it up. Or they’ll include the full hardware requirements for GPS but it’s gated in software. You can go to the dealer, pay $1000 and get navigation turned on.
I’d like to sit here and say well now I’m never going to buy a bmw, but I don’t think that was ever going to be a choice on my part anyway.
BMWs are great cars - as long as you buy ones that are at least 25 years old.
Perhaps paradoxically, this might have turned out to be an advantage rather than a drawback
It sounds like their market research told them they would make more money this way, and my own anecdotal evidence makes me think they are correct, unfortunately.
The area where I live has some diversity and some decent people, but it is majority white christian conservative. The amount of luxury SUVs I see rage-driving around town can be astounding at times. It’s right up there with the amount of frighteningly expensive emotional support trucks with the drivers still wearing their ball caps and wrap-around shades on overcast days.
fuck the subscription model. I want to own my shit!
And i will never commit to BMW.
I will never buy a bmw because of this, and they were on my short list of new car next year.
I’m probably going Volvo now, we will see.
How’s Volvo an alternative to BMW? They don’t even offer engines with more than 4 cylinders nowadays lol
I went with a different brand too. One that just gave all those options as part of the basic package.
Just checking that you are aware that Volvo is basically Chinese now a days.
Your statement is misleading.
From Google.
“Yes, some Volvos are made in China*, as Volvo operates several manufacturing plants there (Chengdu, Daqing, Taizhou) to serve the Chinese and Asian markets, though models for the US and Europe often come from Sweden, Belgium, or the U.S., with some Chinese-made Volvos even exported globally, but recent US-bound models tend to be produced in Europe or the US. The Chinese-owned Geely group owns Volvo, and production locations vary by model, with Chinese plants focusing on specific models like the S90 and XC60 for Asia, while Swedish and Belgian plants produce for Western markets.”
I’m not in these markets nor am I looking at either of these models made in China.
The Chinese-owned Geely group owns Volvo
I mean, they’re not wrong.
Toyota builds its cars in multiple different countries, but it’s still a Japanese company.
