Quote:
Originally Posted by wtwo3
I see this as a positive.
For those of us who were going to buy these feature anyway, we can pay the lifetime fee and not have to worry about any additional monthly subscription costs.
For those of us who might use certain features at certain points of the year depending on seasonality or just access to the car.... then you subscribe temporarily and there's your savings to be had.
Obviously benefits on the used market as well for buyers who can now just buy a single model and not have to worry about which features were and weren't optioned.
I think the benefit to BMW in this whole scenario is that they can now attract a new market of people who might want to "try" a feature which they wouldn't normally have optioned when buying new. And then convert those trials into actual sales.
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I've said it multiple times in this thread but for simple economic reasons this cannot be a positive. The fact that BMW will be installing the hardware for all this stuff on base models will cost them money. BMW putting adaptive cruise and heated everything in all their cars will be few hundred more per car. With a few more features this could be four figures. Not only will they look to recoup this money from consumers but they will want to make a big profit. That means making more from not just the subscribers but every BMW customer. If BMW's expenses are going up this simply can't result in savings BMW buyers/owners.
There are multiple issues for the used market too. Firstly, this will hurt resale values and trade-in values since we will know the next owner will have to re-purchase or re-subscribe for all of these features again. That loss in resale value for owners will be going straight into BMW's pockets. Secondly, BMW can disable everything on every used car that is sold through the dealer even if had be permanently paid for.
The pro-consumer move would be to slightly increase prices but greatly increase standard equipment. Toyota and Lexus did this when they made adaptive cruise control standard equipment a few years ago. (Not saying they're a perfect company though and they have their own subscription scandal right now.) Subscription models are the most anti-consumer way to go about this.