Welcome to microtransaction hell: Buy a BMW, pay monthly for the car's features
pcgamer.comWelcome to actual hell. For most of us, owning a BMW would be an aspirational thing: the latest model from the carmaker will set you back just under $95,000/£80,000. It's not chump change. Now imagine you'd scrimped and saved to afford a big-ticket item like this and then, when you drove it, the thing started nickel-and-diming you like the worst kind of F2P mobile game.
BMW's cars are high-end items, you could fairly describe it as a luxury carmaker, and the company has been interested in how microtransactions could fit into that for a while. It's had some false starts along the way: in 2019 BMW offered a subscription service for Apple CarPlay in the US, which lets you integrate your phone with the vehicle's screens and audio system, for $80 a year. Reaction was so negative that it quickly U-turned and made the feature a standard inclusion across most of its cars.
That doesn't mean it's given up, though, and now it's trialling another offering in South Korea: paying to heat your seats. This costs approximately $18 a month (thanks, the Verge(opens in new tab)), or you can opt to pay for 'unlimited' access for a one-off payment of $415.
The latter option makes this seem more reasonable: after all, a car's ticket price has never included the 'extras' that come in the upsell. The difference-maker here is that BMW's cars are all perfectly capable of stuff such as (deep breath) Active Cruise Control, Adaptive M Suspension, Apple CarPlay, or BMW Drive Recording. It's just that now you need to pay for the software to unlock these features that are built into the car you've already bought.
Where exactly this is happening, outside of South Korea where it's launched, remains to be seen. The BMW UK store, for example, lists a
Read more on pcgamer.com
