BMW’s Latest Subscription Plan Has One Right To Repair Advocate Calling For Pirating Cars

Louis Rossmann is a right-to-repair advocate and owns a computer repair business based in Austin, Texas. He also happens to have over two million subscribers on YouTube where he tackles all sorts of technological and right-to-repair topics. He has called out BMW in the past for its heated-seats subscription gambit, and now the Bavarian Engine Works has him riled up again. This time, it’s over the Adaptive M Suspension subscription program, and the title of the video does not mince words: BMW SaaS model; Suspension-as-a-service. It’s time to start pirating cars.

Just last week, a Reddit user posted screenshots of BMW’s Adaptive M Suspension subscription. Buyers can pay 25 euros per month or up to 460 euros to keep the feature for good without having to pay any subscription at all. According to Rossmann, the problem is that these folks already paid for this feature at the very start.

Essentially, BMW models that are available with Adaptive M Suspension actually have it regardless of whether a buyer options it or not. For those who don’t check that box, the components just lie dormant. It’s not until one subscribes or buys it outright, that the components work to their fullest potential.

The automaker touts this system saying on its website;

Every day, for every road, you decide how you want to drive. With sporty or comfortable suspension. Simply use the Driving Experience Control in the cockpit to adapt the basic suspension settings to your driving style. So now you have a more enjoyable driving experience, and better control on uneven roads.

BMW offers a helpful guide on how to activate the system. Once one pays for it through their BMW ConnectedDrive store, they need to drive the vehicle for at least 15 minutes in a place with good wireless coverage. A message should pop up telling them that it’s enabled.

If it doesn’t, they just have to call customer service, probably wait on hold, go for at least one more (who knows? Maybe more) 15-minute drive, and then maybe the system that shipped with the car will work completely.

While this adds several layers of complexity, the benefit to anyone outside of BMW isn’t entirely clear. Advocates for subscription services will point out that it’s plausible that companies like BMW actually saved money by simply building every car with this hardware rather than creating two product lines.

Rossmann’s retort is that BMW has never dropped prices significantly from one year to the next as a result of that streamlined production. That’s not too hard to track since Adaptive M Suspension (in this form) launched in 2019. I can’t find any record of BMW prices (on affected models) getting lower year over year since then.

On top of that, some buyers might have avoided checking the Adaptive M Suspension option box because they don’t want the hassle of maintaining it over time. Surprise! They’ll still have to! That obviously goes for anyone who buys the car second-hand as well, regardless of whether or not they pay for the subscription.

This is an important distinction for the suspension subscription versus “services” like heated seats, which don’t involve critical wear components or parts likely to be damaged due to a collision or hitting a particularly nasty pothole. If you don’t pay for the heated seat sub, there’s little chance you’ll end up paying more down the road for repairs or maintenance by virtue of the heating components being included in the car, activated or not. The suspension is a different story. If you need to replace an Adaptive M shock, one must assume you’re going to pay for the electronically-controlled variable damping technology built into it whether you’ve activated the software to operate it or not.

Further, the suspension subscription raises an important question: What happens if the first owner buys and pays for the lifetime availability of the feature? Will it revert when owner one sells it to owner two? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard of an automaker trying to sell a software-locked feature twice for the same car.

Factors like these lead Rossmann to suggest that pirating software is justified. BMW owners were hacking their cars years ago, so there’s certainly precedent, and that behavior could return.

Finally, it’s worth noting what Pieter Nota, board member for BMW sales and marketing, told Autocar in 2023:

“What we don’t do any more – and that is a very well-known example – is offer seat heating by [subscription]. It’s either in or out. We offer it by the factory and you either have it or you don’t have it.”

Clearly, something is different now, so we’ve reached out to BMW for additional comment and will update this story if we hear back. How do you feel about subscriptions for hardware-based features? Will such subscriptions be an inevitable part of car ownership? Should we fight it to the bitter end? Let us know down below!