Heated seats controversy highlights the perils of connected car tech – The Irish Times

Who would have thought that heated seats could become such a controversial thing?

For anyone who has ever suffered from a bad back, having a warmed-up car seat can be not merely nice on a cold day, but an absolutely prerequisite for daily life.

Heated seats have gone from being a rare luxury in a high-end car, to an item that has become so common that it now seems stingy when car makers don’t include it as standard.

Which is why it was so controversial when, in 2022, BMW decided that it would make heated seats not merely an optional extra, but something that, via the car’s central connected touchscreen, you’d have to pay a monthly subscription. Netflix for warmed bums, if you like.

The theory was that it’s much more cost-effective for BMW to fit all of its cars, at the factory, with the hardware – the cabling, the actual heating elements, etc – for heated seats, but far more profitable to then make them an optional extra, with the “miracle” of touchscreen tech and over-the-air software updates able to make creating an extra button on the screen a reality, once you’ve ponied up the price.

Jealous of the streaming services and smartphone providers, car makers were searching for ways to squeeze some cash out of Gen Z.

The reaction from car buyers and consumer groups was predictably outraged. Not only did it seem cynical that a car maker would start to charge a monthly fee for something that you previously paid in one upfront sum, but the implication for second-hand buyers was obvious: once you trade-in your subscription-laden car, all of those subscriptions would be wiped, and the next owner would have to pay for them all over again.

BMW backtracked and said that while it might offer one-off post-purchase payments through the touchscreen to activate certain features, it would no longer try to charge a rolling subscription for them.

There was an attempt at justification – the idea that someone might prefer to pay for heated seats for the winter months, and then reduce their subscription in the summer – but it fell on very deaf ears.

If a patent filed by Ford is anything to go by, then the next thing might be cars that repossess themselves

However, this idea of in-car services as subscriptions hasn’t gone away. The car industry says that the idea of “function on demand” (FoD) is being driven by customers.

According to a report by industry watchers Frost & Sullivan: “FoD offers a solution that allows drivers to choose the features they want and pay only for what they use.

“This approach reflects a broader industry trend toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), where manufacturers can introduce new capabilities or update existing ones through Over The Air services.”

We’re not sure who Frost & Sullivan spoke to about that, but we suspect that it was car company accountants, rather than actual consumers.

A reliance on FoD would almost certainly make significant ripples, waves even, in the second-hand market. One of the joys of being too poor to buy a brand new car is that if you’re patient and a careful shopper, you can nab a bargain used car that someone – who could better afford it – spent big on when they browsed the options list, leading to a car loaded with nice, extra toys which haven’t helped them much in terms of used value, but which you can now enjoy for a bargain price.

FoD would undo all of that, as in its ultimate form a car would be effectively wiped and rebooted when traded in, leaving the subsequent owner to pay all over again for the extras that the car had 10 minutes ago. Car companies would love such a future – being paid multiple times for the same components – but consumers would doubtless love it much less.

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Tesla, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the latest car maker to jump on the FoD bandwagon, turning its “full self driving” software and hardware (which isn’t self-driving at all, let alone full) from a one-off optional extra to a monthly subscription, starting from $99 (€84) per month, but with Elon Musk promising that price will rise in line with the sophistication of the service offered.

Musk has been circling issues far more controversial than this of late – let’s not even get going on his AI system’s unpleasant adjacency to child abuse – but with Tesla’s profits falling by 61 per cent on a GAAP basis last year, this starts to feel less like innovation and more like a desperate play for consumers to provide Tesla with a monthly revenue stream.

Rejoice, then, that Audi might be heading in the other direction. The premium German brand has had its (un)fair share of financial headwinds in the past year, but its new design boss – Massimo Frascella – is winning drivers’ hearts not just with his gorgeous Concept C sports car, but also by slamming touchscreens.

In an interview with Top Gear magazine, Frascella said that touchscreen technology for the sake of it is a bad idea, and he’s underlined that by bringing back an idea from an old Audi A3 hatchback – a touchscreen that disappears behind the dashboard when you don’t want to be distracted by it, a feature Frascella included in the Concept C.

However, perhaps we shouldn’t get our hopes up too much. Frascella is talking about design, not technology, and Audi has said it, too, is going to ramp up its FoD offerings in the future.

So far, the worries have been consumer-based – features being switched on and off at the whim of a merciless customer service department, planned obsolescence disguised as “withdrawal of support for that model”, and so on. There’s an even more worrying potential to connected cars, though. They could be turned against us.

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How so? Well, if a patent filed by Ford is anything to go by, then the next thing might be cars that repossess themselves.

No, this doesn’t mean a car that needs to be doused with holy water and reported to some secretive agency in the Vatican. It means a car which can simply drive itself back to the dealership if you fall behind in your PCP payments.

This is more of an issue in the US than in Europe, where financial providers are more likely to engage with a customer who’s defaulted on payment to sort things out with a new repayment plan. In the US, things can be more aggressive when it comes to falling behind on your loans, and the Ford tech is the autonomous new tip of that spear.

The patent – titled pretty plainly “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle” – includes a few interventions before the final act. First, the on-board screens will start reminding you that you’ve missed a loan payment. Then, the vehicle will, petulantly, start disabling important features such as your phone connection, or maybe the air conditioning, or – of course – the heated seats.

The systems can even kill the engine to prevent you from driving the car at all (with a fail-safe in an emergency, although how long you’ll have to be on hold on a hotline to get the car unlocked at that point is unclear).

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Finally, there is a line in the patent suggesting an eventual fully autonomous ability for the car to drive itself back to the dealership, or even to the nearest scrap yard if it’s decided that the value has fallen far enough to not make it worth reselling.

The system can scan its surroundings to check that it’s not been parked in a closed garage to prevent itself driving away, but there’s no word on what happens in that case. Is there a chainsaw hidden in the front bumper, allowing the car to cut itself free?

My late father, whenever I told him with unbridled enthusiasm about some new whizz-bang piece of automotive technology, would say it was “just another thing to go wrong”. Imagine his horror if he could be confronted with technology that can not only fail, but which is designed to squeeze more money from you before it does so.