Somewhere in the early 2020s, in a BMW parked in Britain, there was a heating element doing nothing. It had been installed at the factory, stitched under the upholstery, wired into the car’s electrics. It had added its small cost to the build and its small weight to the payload. On a January morning it was entirely capable of warming the person sitting on it, and it did not, because the person sitting on it had not subscribed. The seat was not broken. The seat was unpaid.
The outrage this arrangement provoked is usually filed under corporate greed, and the filing is too quick. Had BMW simply charged more for a car with the heaters switched on, nobody would have said a word — the total outlay could have been identical. What detonated was the discovery that the restriction was artificial. The company had built the capability into the object and then fenced it off, and the monthly fee was not a payment for heat but a payment for the removal of a no. People will pay for things. They turn out to have a deep, almost instinctive objection to paying rent on their own possessions — and the interesting question is why that instinct is economically sound rather than merely sentimental.
BMW began offering the subscriptions in 2020, in markets including South Korea and the UK — never in North America, whose buyers were spared the programme and got to experience the anger secondhand. The same year, the company announced that its in-car operating system would support microtransactions for features like automatic high beams. When The Verge converted the UK pricing in July 2022, heated seats ran about $18 a month, $180 for a year, $300 for three years or $415 for “unlimited” access — a revealing word, since an unlimited tier for a physical component concedes that the monthly version was never a service.
The production logic, as The Drive reported, was almost elegant: roughly nine out of ten BMWs are ordered with heated seats anyway, so fitting them in every car streamlined the assembly line, and the holdouts could unlock them later. Every vehicle left the factory complete, and was then, for some of its occupants, incomplete. The company had not found a way to charge for warmth. It had found a way to make withholding warmth efficient.
By September 2023 it was over. “What we don’t do anymore — and that is a very well-known example — is offer seat heating by this way,” BMW board member Pieter Nota told Autocar. “It’s either in or out.” His post-mortem became the most quoted line of the episode: “People feel that they paid double — which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say.” Nota reportedly still believed the model was sound. He was half right. The perception was reality, just not in the way he meant. The hardware was in the car, its cost was somewhere in the price, and asking again was, structurally, a second charge on the same component. What buyers detected was not a billing error but a change in what buying means.
What survived
The retreat, it turns out, was a boundary survey. BMW kept the subscriptions for software and services — the driving and parking assistance, the data-dependent features. Its Driving Assistant Plus package could still be specified at order for £750 or taken later as a free trial followed by about £35 a month, and nobody rioted, because a feature that leans on servers and updates plausibly resembles a service. The revolt taught the industry where the line sits: rent may be charged on anything that touches the internet, but not on a coil of wire. Elsewhere the fence went up around larger components — Tesla, as Ars Technica has noted, has artificially restricted usable battery capacity in some of its cars, range the pack physically holds, withheld by code.
Farm equipment has been living in this future for years. Modern tractors are software-gated against their own owners: a breakdown a farmer could fix in an afternoon can require an authorised technician with the right diagnostic keys. The Public Interest Research Group calculated — in its own op-ed, so treat the arithmetic as advocacy — that repair restrictions cost American farmers $4.2 billion a year, $3 billion of it in downtime alone. Printers interrogate their ink cartridges about their pedigree. Some states have responded with right-to-repair laws requiring manufacturers to hand over manuals, parts and tools, though the loopholes are generous. The pattern repeats everywhere: the vendor stays inside the object after the sale, a permanent tenant holding a master key.
When the vendor gets bored
Underneath all of this sits a quieter question: what happens when the company loses interest? Ownership used to mean the thing was finished when you bought it — finished as in complete, and finished as in the relationship was over. You could be forgotten by the manufacturer and nothing about the object would change. A subscription feature is never finished. It requires the vendor’s continuing participation — servers, staff, a business case — and participation ends. When support is withdrawn, an ordinary product merely stops improving; a connected, licensed product loses things it had the day before. That degradation is not entropy. It is scheduled, not by physics but by contract, and it can arrive long before the object wears out. Cars routinely outlive the divisions that built them. The open question of the next decade is whether they can outlive the billing relationship.
Nota’s epitaph for the heated seat — “it’s either in or out” — was meant as a concession. It deserves a second life as a standard. In or out is what ownership sounds like: the thing is whole, the transaction ends, and nobody owes anyone a monthly yes. The heated-seat revolt is remembered as a consumer victory, and it was, of a kind. But its real function was market research. The industry learned, at modest cost, exactly which parts of your property can be rented back to you and which cannot. The seats are safe. Everything with an antenna is still being priced.