Here’s some good news for BMW owners who enjoy using heated seats in Malaysia for whatever reason. The German automaker has decided to no longer charge you with a monthly subscription for enabling the built-in feature, saying that its introduction has been poorly received by customers. Shocking.
Sure enough, users can no longer find listings for Front Seat Heating and Steering Wheel Heating in the brand’s ConnectedDrive digital store, though everything else such as Smartphone Integration and Remote Engine Start are still there. In an interview with Autocar, BMW board member Pieter Nota explained that the brand will no longer charge customers to activate hardware-based functions and instead retain this approach for software-based services.
“We thought that we would provide an extra service to the customer by offering the chance to activate [seat heating] later, but the user acceptance isn’t that high,” he said. “People feel that they paid double – which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say.”
Nota added that customers are more willing to pay for on-demand functions and service related products such as driving and parking assistance, noting that these offerings are akin to downloading a film or an extra feature on an app. “People know it’s a certain piece of software they can download that costs money,” the BMW board member explained. “That is accepted and we do that increasingly successfully.”
With this change in direction, BMW owners can rest assured that other factory-ready features apart from heating (such as air conditioning, seat adjustments and so on) are spared from ever being offered as optional paid services. Nevertheless, the fact remains, consumers are rarely fond of the idea of having to pay extra for something that’s supposedly shipped out as a completed product. Especially for the likes of BMW cars, which are already offered at a premium to begin with.
(Source: Autocar)
