Louis Rossmann made a video on it, and something that came to mind while I was watching it was that while regulation can in fact be abused, I think some regulation has to be in place because a company that can charge whatever it wants for a car doing this just for the sake of control is awful. Do we really own the things we buy, or do the corporations?
I know in the EU, they have a lot more laws/regulations about warranties and other R2R shit, I just want to be able to fix the shit I own by myself without the company hindering me from doing so because they want to treat me like a leasee while charging me purchase prices.
Edit: Starting in South Korea, but very concerned that it could be brought here considering horse armor started the gaming industry’s bullshit.
It's hard to say because you usually have to move up a trim level to get heated seats and steering wheels but those prices seem to be about what those features would add to your car payment if bought outright.
I'm thinking BMW wanted to simplify manufacturing and not produce unheated seats at all while adding granularity to the availability of features, but I guess if you're adding the heated seats in anyway they need DRM to keep people from activating them for free- so might as well make it a recurring payment.
I can see how a series of mildly scummy moves all came together to create a wildly scummy move.
Another wrinkle is every major news outlet report I read implied you have to subscribe for a year at a time, but "brobible" (idk what that is) makes it clear you can subscribe for individual months, so you could just pay $36 for the heart of winter if you want.
That's not really bad compared to a crappy Amazon/Chinese heated seat overlay that looks and feels like crap, that you have to unplug when not in use, and could catch fire at any minute.
Mass production actually makes it cheaper to produce as few different variables as possible. It's quite plausible that it started this way, but then turned into this when they ran it past the suits.