BMW has published a full subscription price list for its customers in South Korea. Most of the equipment the cars come with can be opted in and out of as you see fit, and you can even choose the ‘Unlimited’ subscription option to feel like some of the car you drive actually belongs to you.
Customers are free to pay for one month in advance, a whole year or three years. Keeping your seats properly heated will set you back the equivalent of $283 USD for three years, $176 for a year or $18 for a month. 30 days of holding a warm steering wheel costs $10, while seeing things better with Matrix LED headlights is worth $8.5.
Much to the dismay of the subscription system fans, some options you can only purchase once. These include Apple CarPlay support ($308) and IconicSounds Sport ($139). The latter can be found in the new BMW 3-Series, for example, which you can see in our gallery here. An important thing to notice here is that there seems to be no mention anywhere whether these features are automatically transferred to another owner when you sell your car. If not (which may well be the case if the features stay locked to your user account, for example), that would mean the buyer of your car will have to pay to reactivate them once again.
Studies have shown that drivers worldwide tend to regard the idea of subscription-based services as detrimental to the industry as a whole. Only 25% respondents say they agree to pay monthly fees to continue using the hardware their car initially came equipped with.