BMW is framing this as a “one-time movie partnership”
What kind of people do you think are eating that up?
“Guys, it’s just this one-time ad, we had no intention of ever doing this again! Just forget about it for a year or so!”
It’s one-time in the sense that it’s this movie. Next one-time will be for the next movie
Just the tip
“It is a one time fee that you pay annually.” One of the best Portlandia skits.
I’m guessing the long term plan is to significantly increase the price of maintenance and updates then offer a cheaper plan with dashboard adds.
One reason this type of promotion may be becoming more common is that connected cars give automakers a direct path to the driver’s screen.
Once a person purchases a vehicle it should be theirs, not shared access with Automakers and their partners.
It hasn’t been that way for a long time. Every car since 2018 has some sort of black box in it that it records your driving behaviors, and that data gets sent to or sold to insurance companies who then use it to raise your premiums.
How are these black boxes reporting back though? Do all these cars just have a free SIM card built in?
They do in fact. It’s also how the app connectivity works in modern cars.
Typically a soldered on sim chip, or esim software. You can disable it on some cars, for example I was able to bypass it on my 4runner pretty easily. I lost the feature to find my car, lock doors or see its status using the Toyota app though but I am 100% ok with that.
They do. They hide it as an SOS system. “Only used in case of emergency.” It’s connected to GPS, sim like a cellphone that has at least 4g cell service to “call emergency.” I think Chevy used their Onstar connection. That’s always on, and the data text files can be sent without interrupting that service.
OnStar is the worst for selling data. They even record your body weight.
I’m not sure about this black box, but in the EU, the e-call system is mandatory, so all new cars do indeed have a sim. Though it’s most likely not a card, but either a chip (iSIM) or just in software (eSIM).
I think cunts who drive like cunts should pay more.
However, the real reason why cars have black boxes is repeated fraudulent claims by US law firms on “sudden acceleration”.The last lawsuit ended because Toyota had black box data proving US drivers are shit and commonly hit the wrong pedal. Before that, they had to settle $1B to law firms.
Oh, I agree with that. People who drive like complete assholes should definitely have to pay higher insurance premiums, but the way that they get the data to determine who these people are is just a huge privacy concern for me.
One reason this type of promotion may be becoming more common is that connected cars give automakers a direct path to the driver’s screen.
“Wo ein Trog ist, da kommen die Schweine.”
This doesn’t count as vandalism??
Or a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act!
It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox.”
LOOOOOLOLOL
For people who had forgotten the seat heating subscription
Why do they keep trying to pull this bullshit?, they’re a luxury brand, there margins should be pretty good without trying to nickel and dime everything
Cos there are enough dumb people who are ready to pay for this shit.
Same with lootboxes in gaming, everyone hates them but there are enough people purchasing them so that the companies can keep pulling shit like this off.
No matter what BMW tries to tell you in their press releases, they were never considered a luxury brand in Europe. As for German cars it goes more or less like this: Maybach >>>>>>> Porsche >>> Audi > Mercedes >>>>>>>>>>>> BMW > Volkswagen > Opel.
I’d argue that Mercedes > Audi
Same. Merc is top to me. BMW close second. I have a lot of respect for Audi, but only had experience with A3 and A4 Wagon. Both had very aggressive and stiff ride feel. Fun, but not what I want from a daily commuter.
Capitalism doesn’t understand “good enough”, only MOAR
Line must go up.
Because income sources like subscriptions and ads are stable, predictable, and that makes shareholders happy.
There are no brakes on capitalism. It’s always more, more and more.
I think it has something to do with the markets infatuation with recurring revenue streams. Everything is a subscription model now.
Have you ever heard of next quarter?
they are doing this for two reasons:
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Dropping sales from angry BMW owners fed up with poor reliability.
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Dropping sales to Tesla.
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Dropping sales because of poor EV designs
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Dropping sales because they fail to establish value.
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No amount of money can satisfy their empty fucking hearts and minds
I don’t have a BMW.
An incomplete solution, but a good one.
I don’t even have a dashboard and the only electrical thing on my bicycle are the lights. If they can put ads on that I’d be really impressed.
I was actually going the but the new i3, but now that’s not happening. Guess I’ll have to wait for the new Polestar 2 insread.
Yeah… I was considering a Audi etron or the I4. Well choice is mutch simpler now. Same for my dad. He is considering the I7 but might hold off on that idea.
Well the e-tron, assuming you meant the SUV not the sportscar, sucks in terms of ride comfort. You’re better off with any old Audi non-Electric vehicle with air springs. For the other Audi e-tron (the GT), you’re better off simply getting the Porsche Taycan which is almost the same car, but from their sister brand that actually has a reputation to uphold, unlike Audi. BMW i4 is a significantly newer vehicle than either though, the Taycan and E-Tron are pretty outdated. This is all from when EVs were changing rapidly and 2 years made a massive difference.
There’s also unfortunately no direct replacement for the i7 if your dad wants to go electric 100%. The EQS is a weird shaped thing and reported to be plagued with quality issues that an S-Class or 7 series equivalent should NOT have (loose or creaky plastics, wtf Mercedes, you had that figured out decades ago and now you can’t do it anymore?) and Audi doesn’t even have an electric flagship sedan. But the current A8 is well due for a replacement being a decade old and the S-Class is due for a replacement in a few years, so they may well come up with new EV models in parallel to their new ICE models. For the recent GLC launch they also did a “GLC with EQ technology” which is not really the exact same car but electrified, but rather still a dedicated EV platform, just with familiar branding brought back. Hoping for an “S-Class EQ” personally, not that I’ll be buying one, I don’t buy new cars.
There are also the Chinese cars, but they’re not going to be any better than BMW. Some new Chinese EV, think it was either a BYD or Xiaomi, was being shown by a YouTuber who showcased how you can now stand in front of the frunk and tell the car to open the frunk (because apparently THAT needs to be a voice action now). That’s microphones on the EXTERIOR of your car now. Do we really think that’s not going to be used for targeted advertisements and other forms of tracking? Like you have a conversation next to your car and see ads about that?
My dad currently owns a etron 55. Wonderful car if you ask me just not my riding style. But the service from Audi is absolutely horrific over here. Big part due to the official importer for the vehicles. Services is non existent and surprise bills of 10K+ are common.
That would be a reason for me to steer away from Audi as well. However the car I got in mind is indeed the etron GT. In my opinion a much more premium car then the Porsche taycan. I have driven in both and the etron clearly wins drive comfort to me. Just Audi service is so bad…
The I4 would be a more nice middle ground for me but then BMW does this type of shit. In regards of driving electric. Yes that is a requirement. We have all been driving for 12+ years fully electric at this point.
The car manufactures that IMO becomes more and more interesting is KIA and Opel. Service is great cars are more serviceable hen other brands. And pricing is not half bad. Unfortunately they don’t make nice sporty electric vehicles yet.
“we are a premium brand”
my ass.
These “premium” German brands are all committing suicide. Rejecting electric cars, rejecting nuclear power, designing cars that look like puke, and doing everything to monetize your use of the car.
With incompetent leadership like this, those 8k workers being laid off from BMW is just the beginning.
don’t worry, they’ll keep stoking nationalist paranoia and shift to weapon production. What’s the worst that could happen?
German car brands are rejecting nuclear power?
You don’t see them launching cars powered by their own onboard reactors, do you?
You are right!
I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(
suicide […] rejecting nuclear power
Uhuh. That plant that had to shut down, because the rivers are too hot.
And why is it so hot, I wonder
CO², nuclear didn’t help much against it.
You’re right, they should keep burning coal. Clean, beautiful coal, works no matter how hot it gets!
As if there’s not already entire countries with mostly renewable.
Nope, there’s not. Countries like Denmark which pretty much only produces wind power is completely reliant on importing energy from countries with a diverse energy mix, without which they would have blackouts every week.
The premium is unfortunately not in the interior and infotainment experience, at least not these days. And I guess to non car people, the infotainment is what sells cars now.
The Germans still build the best* ICE drivetrains, the best chassis and suspension setups, to give you an excellent ride quality AND sporty handling in the same 2 ton family station wagon. Nobody compares, not even Volvo. But interior layouts have been going downhill steadily for like a decade now. And when it comes to EVs, you can’t really compete without being Chinese anyway. Other countries don’t have access to the same battery pricing, nor the same labor costs (to be fair the latter applies to both ICE and EV alike).
They’ll all die slow deaths. As EVs become mandated, Chinese companies will take over because nobody else can afford to sell cars for so cheap. The Chinese cars will of course have all the same infotainment issues like unwanted ads and they’ll be similar privacy nightmares, plus the prices will go up once you can only buy Chinese cars. It’ll be fun and we’ll all love it.
* Toyota Supra A90 used BMW’s B58 engine. That should tell you everything you need to know. TOYOTA didn’t bother coming up with their own engine for the chassis they also got from BMW. It’s been heralded as the modern 2JZ.
The Germans still build the best* ICE drivetrains, the best chassis and suspension setups, to give you an excellent ride quality
Dad has a BMW. It has a too smooth dampening and steering adjustment to speed, so you’ll vastly underestimate how fast you’re driving. I won’t drive his car anymore; too dangerous.
That tends to be adjustable in cars now. Oftentimes the comfort setting is vague on purpose on a lot of cars. My Audi in comfort is fine if not a bit too soft for spirited driving on back roads, on Dynamic it’s perfect for that. It’s a 2007 Allroad though. Still has hydraulic (but variable) power steering and such.
When I had my 2019 C-Class, it felt just right for this type of driving, even though that one had steel springs and no adjustable dampers, but did have adjustable steering since it was fully electric power steering. It also felt completely at home cruising at 150-160 km/h (no autobahn here so I wouldn’t go faster than that usually).
Only BMW I ever owned was an E61 and that one also had superb road feel, though I hear the newer ones aren’t as good, since they do optimize for the highway rather than the curvy roads I personally prefer driving on.
In comparison, I test drove a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a small electric hatchback I thought would be sporty-ish, and that had zero road feel. Outright dangerous going fast into a corner with it, and with the electric torque it was certainly tempting to do so before I realized how little I know about its grip limits.
The Germans still build the best* ICE drivetrains
Until the lease expires, then they are a nightmare to maintain. Money pits.
AUDI intentionally placed the timing chains backwards in motors so a high mileage timing chain replacement would require a full engine out and cost more than the car is worth. BMW used plastics in their pressurized fuel system with failure rates known after a set number of heat cycles, they are blowing up.
Plenty of non Chinese brands are on the EV train now.
I can buy an Alpine that it is, in every conceivable way, better than the cheapest VW EV (while being a bit cheaper, or the same price). How is this not a problem with German manufacturers specifically?
What are all the conceivable ways to you? Anyway, the Renault 5 is almost as much as the bigger id.3 neo here and we don’t have anyone selling the Alpine version as it’s more expensive than the 5 and thus too expensive for such a tiny car.
And all of these cost at least 4x as much as a similarly sized but lower power BYD does in China. That’s how much cheaper the Chinese can build their cars. When they sell the same batteries to Renault or VW, the batteries alone likely cost about as much as BYD’s entire car. And we can’t really produce these batteries at such scale here in Europe because of pollution regulation. China processes most of the world’s lithium and cobalt. Only hope we have is coming up with a magic battery chemistry that doesn’t come with a ton of environmental issues, but unfortunately Donut Labs is more than likely a scam.
I guess my plan to run my car into the ground should be updated to keep my car going until I leave this mortal coil. /hj
if your car has internet access, it’s not yours
I mean, that’s really true of products in general.
I think that there are some real consumer law issues to answer where someone buys a product and then a manufacturer can control the product subsequent to the purchase. Like, say I buy a BMW with the expectation that I am not going to be seeing ads, based on the way it acts at the time that I bought it. At that point, I’m locked into owning that BMW. Then the manufacturer degrades my experience, maybe to the point where I no longer consider the vehicle to be the one I wanted.
Like, what is my remedy here? If the vehicle has OTA updates, I can never know what it’s going to be doing down the line, so I can’t make an informed decision. Having informed consumers is one of the basic requirements for markets to be efficient.
Maybe I could say “Well, that’s just a case of let the buyer beware. We’ll rely on reputation…some auto manufacturers will piss off consumers and those will be avoided”. But…if someone doesn’t buy cars that frequently, that’s a long iteration cycle.
I’m actually more concerned about video games. Like, if I’m a publisher, once I sell a video game, I don’t normally have more revenue coming in from it. But if I do have the ability to update that video game down the line. And I can update it to go harvesting user data, which turns it into a revenue stream. A lot of video game publishers go defunct on a regular basis or sell IP or whatnot, so there, even the “rely on reputation” route is more questionable.
I too have been getting concerned about video games. There is a lot of trust about installing software with no review, frequent updates, and runs at a system level, particularly for windows users.
Honestly, GNU/Linux isn’t better today from a user standpoint. I mean, Linux has the technical subsystems to sandbox software, yes — like, the move to Wayland makes isolating graphical software possible, where X11 imposed major limitations on one’s ability to do that. Various containerizing systems exist. But the typical software package distributed via Steam, say, in 2026, can see the filesystem as a whole.
Like, I can hack something up with something like
firejailusing that functionality that may-or-may-not work for a given game on a given system, but that’s not a real, universal solution for users. My mother is not going to do that.Mobile OSes at least isolate most apps from most of the filesystem and some sensors, and provide some level of reasonably-accessible transparency into what apps can do. They still have their own issues that annoy me, like software normally being able to phone home with what information it does get. But that’s still way more isolation than a user who is playing a video game on GNU/Linux is getting.
Global, always-generally-available connectivity brought us a lot of nice things, but it’s also come with a lot of not-so-great things, and some of the not-so-great things is a loss of privacy and a loss of control over the things that we own. :-(
This sounds like something that should be illegal.
I’m willing to bet that these cars do not get software updates wirelessly though. You gotta take your car into the stealership for those. But ads? Instant wireless transmission.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Walk like an Egyptian…
