Like it or not, we are at the dawn of an era in the automotive industry where automakers will offer certain services and features on a subscription basis. It’s very hard to accept that your new vehicle will hide locked features or more power behind a paywall, but the reality is that companies like Mercedes-Benz already offer subscription programs for some of their electric vehicles. It turns out that BMW won’t go the same way, but the reason for this decision is purely economic.
bmwHead of Technical Development, Frank Weber, speaking during a media session at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show 2023. Weber confirmed that BMW (at least for now) does not intend to offer over-the-air performance upgrades for its future electric vehicles, but does in general The company sees no problems with this. The problem is that if you change the performance specifications of a model that is already on the market, you have to report these changes to the regulator, BMW blog reports.
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Simply put, BMW doesn’t want to spend too much time and money repeating this process every time it upgrades an EV. If we try to read between the lines, the revenue from subscription fees may not be enough to cover the expenses caused by the technical regulations. If no solution is found in the future to make this process faster and cheaper, the performance of your BMW EV will always remain unchanged by the automaker.
We’ll have to wait for further action from Mercedes-Benz, which recently announced a $1,200 annual subscription to make certain EQ models more powerful. This program is currently only available in the United States because the automaker is confronted with “legal matters”. prevent the subscription from being rolled out in Europe. We don’t know if the Stuttgarters will have to deal with the same legal issues, but we can only hope that Mercedes will also abandon its subscription-based performance upgrades like BMW.
