> "Unauthorized Bread"—a tale of jailbreaking refugees versus IoT appliances—is the lead novella in author Cory Doctorow's Radicalized

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

As long as you can find the wires that provide power to the seat heaters, add a switch, and splice it into some power, I imagine one can enable it without any software changes.

Let me introduce you to our good 'friend' Control Module.

*friends, my 435i has something like 30 ECUs

But people still do find defeats for most of those. The reality is BMW doesn't care because the average person won't bother with any of that and will just pay.

I'm not sure the average person drives a BMW. I don't know, maybe if you can afford to drive a BMW, you don't mind having to rent something you already bought. I have a feeling that if Honda or Toyota pulled this shit, nobody would buy the models that had it.

Renting things like heated seats? It feels bizarre to even have to discuss such a dystopically stupid idea.

It is a silly idea 100%. However, I think BMW knows its customer here. I like to chat up the repair people sometimes. The one conversations that stuck with me for years after bringing in my older BMW. "oh wow have not seen one of these in awhile" (it was 8 years old at that point). "huh, what do you mean?" "oh most of what we deal with in here is lease". A lease is pretty much subscribing to a car service with terrible financial terms.

There are plenty of people out there that make decent money but are bad at managing it.

well, terrible is a relative term, maybe they make so much they don't care.

Everyone buying iPhone knows it's not a financially optimal decision

Where to begin...

First off, saying "the average person would do X" is a hypothetical. It doesn't mean they're in that situation: "If given choice between modifying car and paying money, will pay money"

Second, the article is about BMW, so even if you missed that it'd still be pretty easy to infer an average person amongst their customers...

Third, what's with the weird dig against people for owning BMWs. Different people can want different things... and there's a reason Toyota's halo sports car is rolling around with a BMW powerplant.

Fourth, Toyota started this is 5 years ago by paywalling remote start not just with the app, but with your normal physical key fob: https://ktvo.com/news/auto-matters/costs-associated-with-ent...

They even doubled down and removed the physical button on newer models!: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/toyota-remote-start-digit...

Is the control module built into the heating pads themselves?

I fail to see how it matters, really. Heating is generally pretty straight forward. Apply current, get heat. Bypass the module altogether and stick something else in its place?

Absolutely, seat warmers are typically nothing more than a resistive grid under the fabric. A quick check for how power's supplied in case there's a requirement for current control, and wire in a physical switch.

Unless there's something snuck in that throws codes if the seat heater does something unexpected - wouldn't that be something, DRM for Bimmer bun warmers. In which case if it's not possible to fool the system by wiring in a resistor instead, then it's a car to avoid as seat warmers are rather prone to broken traces over time from occupants bouncing and shuffling around on the seats, which could render the car unregisterable in regions that check OBD codes.

I had a BMW i3 2017. Last year one of the front turn signal lights broke. So I went to the shop to ask for a replacement bulb.

There I learned you can't just replace the bulb, no. The whole light module had to be replaced, $350 + work.

These things are getting ridiculously integrated. Wouldn't surprise me if the seat heaters had some integrated temperature controller unit just because.

> Yes you can do that with a SASS product but no you cannot for a physical product.

Why?

Not that I am in favor of this but are there really objective arguments to support that?

One can argue that the ecological impact is higher due to the need for additional materials but maybe people buy new a car only because they didn't have feature X and installing it afterwards is too expensive.

Because you're getting a good deal out of it. They're managing the hardware it runs on. Keeping the software up to date.

The customer gets a good deal. We have office 365. Users self manage. They can download and install on devices as they want. Before office 365 I had to install it for them. It's a big win for our business. We have no dedicated I.T. people. I'm a developer that does a little here and there but we work to avoid anything with I.T. costs. SASS is a brilliant solution to our problem.

Yeah I'll pay a subscription for an on going service.

I won't pay a subscription for enabling a feature I then have to maintain. If the seat heater fails, I have to pay to fix it.

You make a very good point, but makes me wonder if they were fully responsible for maintaining the seats as part of the contract, would that then make this acceptable?

Yeah I think so.

Mechanical insurance is the equivalent.

Because for the heated seats there are no server fees, maintenance costs, firmware updates, patches, future features under development, product teams thinking about lifecycle, the list goes on. The same can’t be said for AI in Teslas or Whoop straps which can justify the cost / subscription.

There are maintenance costs associated to heated seats. The rest of the sentence you wrote falls under maintenance cost anyway.

The seats are there whether they use it or not. The ecological impact is the same regardless. (Actually installing it without ever allowing its use might be worst of all so maybe you could say the ecological impact is worse by this approach than all others.)

The SASS product is more akin to paying for ongoing use of energy. The more it's used the more an impact there is.

> Not that I am in favor of this but are there really objective arguments to support that?

This annoys me so much. It's pretty clear "cannot" in this context means in their opinion non-justifiable. There is no such thing as an objective opinion and those who believe in objective opinions generally are just referring to their own thoughts as objective.

> I hope people promptly come up with ways to enable these features for free. This is nothing short of criminal. To charge for a feature that is physically in the car.

This is very common. It is often cheaper to have a single SKU and enable/disable features via software than to create a separate one. I don't see what could be criminal about that.

It is common in industry that use SAAS, modular systems, etc. Not with purely physical goods.

I'm surprised practices like these have legal legs. No reasonable finance statement/legal statement will stand behind a $3.5k line item under manufacturing for a robot to flip a switch to enable a software setting on already installed hardware.

Example w/ non-real numbers: BMW x5 with front facing radar, dealer enabled, cost of goods sold = $31,000. MSRP = $60k.

BMW x5 with front facing radar installed, dealer disabled, cogs =$31,000.MSRP= $56.5k.

This is not healthy for a company to rely on.