Louis Rossmann is a right-to-repair advocate and owns a computer repair business based in Austin, Texas. He also has over two million subscribers on YouTube, where he covers all sorts of topics related to technology and the right to repair. In the past, he has criticized BMW for its heated seat subscription trick, and now the Bavarian Motor Works has riled him up again. This time, it’s about the “Adaptive M Suspension” subscription program, and the title of the video pulls no punches: BMW SaaS model; chassis as a service. It’s time to start pirating cars.
Just last week, a Reddit user posted screenshots of the subscription for BMW’s Adaptive M suspension. Buyers can pay €25 per month or up to €460 to keep the feature permanently without having to pay a subscription at all. According to Rossmann, the problem is that these people have already paid for this feature to begin with.
Essentially, BMW models available with the adaptive M suspension actually have it, regardless of whether the buyer orders it as an option or not. For those who don’t tick that box, the components simply remain unused. It’s only when you subscribe or buy outright that the components can reach their full potential.
The car manufacturer advertises on its website with the words:
Every day, on every road, you decide how you want to drive. With a sporty or comfortable chassis. Simply adjust the basic chassis settings to your driving style using the driving experience switch in the cockpit. This gives you even more driving pleasure and better control on uneven roads.
BMW provides helpful instructions on how to activate the system. Once you’ve paid for it through the BMW ConnectedDrive Store, you need to drive the vehicle for at least 15 minutes in a place with good cell reception. A message should appear telling you it’s activated.
If not, all you have to do is call customer service, probably wait on hold, drive for at least another fifteen minutes (who knows? Maybe more), and then the system that came with the car might work fine again.
While this introduces greater complexity, the benefit to anyone outside of BMW isn’t entirely clear. Proponents of subscription services will point out that it’s plausible that companies like BMW actually saved money by simply building every car with this hardware rather than creating two product lines.
Rossmann counters that BMW has never significantly reduced prices from one year to the next due to rationalized production. This is not too difficult to understand since the Adaptive M suspension (in this form) came onto the market in 2019. I can’t find any record of BMW prices (for affected models) falling from year to year since then.
In addition, some buyers may not have activated the “Adaptive M suspension” option because they do not want to deal with maintenance. Surprise! They still have to! This of course applies to everyone who also buys the car second-hand, regardless of whether he pays the subscription or not.
This is an important distinction between the suspension subscription and “services” like seat heaters, which don’t affect critical wear parts or parts that could be damaged in an impact or when driving over a particularly bad pothole. If you don’t pay for the seat heater subscription, there’s little chance you’ll have to pay more for repairs or maintenance later, because the heating components are included in the car, activated or not. The suspension is a different story. If you need to replace an adaptive M shock absorber, you can assume you’re paying for the electronically controlled variable damping technology built into it, whether or not you’ve activated the software to operate it.
Furthermore, the suspension of the subscription raises an important question: What happens if the first owner purchases the feature and pays for its lifetime availability? Will it be reset if owner one sells it to owner two? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard of an automaker trying to sell a software-locked feature twice for the same car.
Factors like these lead Rossmann to believe that pirating software is justified. BMW owners have hacked their cars years ago, so there is certainly precedent, and this behavior could occur again.
Finally, it is worth mentioning what Pieter Nota, Member of the Board of Management for Sales and Marketing at BMW, said: Autocar in 2023:
“What we no longer do – and this is a very well-known example – is offer seat heating by (subscription). It’s either included or not. We offer it as a factory-fitted option and you either have it or you don’t.”
Obviously something is different now, so we’ve reached out to BMW for further comment and will update this story if we hear back. What do you think about subscriptions for hardware-based features? Will such subscriptions be an inevitable part of car ownership? Should we fight this to the bitter end? Let us know below!
