BMW owners figure out how to pirate their heated seats

“You wouldn’t download a car” is a meme tweak from an infamous anti-piracy ad campaign (opens in new tab) from the past. It’s a ridiculous statement, yet it always inspired a silent response in my head: “You better believe I would if I could, buddy.” Of course I can’t, but I can now download a very small part of a car: the part that keeps my butt warm on cold Canadian nights.

We learned a few weeks ago that BMW is testing a heated seat subscription model (opens in new tab) in his cars in South Korea, and charges $18 a month or a $415 one-time fee to access the heated seats in swanky new Beemers. It’s a grotesque but probably inevitable result of the broken capitalist hell we’ve built for ourselves, and as with most things, there’s a good chance it will get worse.

BMW’s subscription scheme is doubly blatant because owners don’t pay for anything extra, but only for the ability to enable things that are already in their cars. only a wired one (opens in new tab) report reveals smart drivers are learning they can bypass these systems. It’s still going to cost money in most cases, but much less than what BMW charges – and, most importantly, BMW gets none of it.

UK-based Litchfield Motors (opens in new tab)focuses mainly on chip tuning, for example (opens in new tab)— Adjusting or changing EEPROMs to improve a car’s performance, but can also help owners with other digital features, including heated seats for a fee. Interestingly, owner Iain Litchfield said these kinds of shenanigans aren’t entirely new to the auto industry, which has a long history of restricting access to new car features, usually without owners even being aware that they were missing.

“When the Nissan GTR was launched [in 2007] it had about 480 horsepower, and the last editions had about 560 horsepower,” Litchfield said. “All Nissan did was increase the turbo boost by 0.1 bar each time. They would say the exhaust or an intercooler had been changed and maybe they were something different, but it was really the boost that gave the upgrade.”

However, the BMW situation is different as it is ongoing and open ended. Missing a payment and suddenly those fine Corinthian leather seats will feel horribly cold in the early morning hours, even though the heating remains fully functional.

The concept of ownership is becoming increasingly vague in the digital age. The games you own on Steam or Origin, for example, are yours only as long as your account is valid – lose that and all your games belong to it. Movies are moving in the same direction – bought and “owned” on digital platforms rather than physical media – and the music industry has moved even further down that path, with many people simply consuming music through subscription-based services like Spotify.

But while software and music piracy has been around for as long as computers and recorders have existed, it is a relatively new phenomenon in the realm of physical products. And it’s a problem that could potentially bite many people in the ass in a very unexpected way. For example, a very interesting Vice report from 2017 revealed that farmers in Nebraska were forced to resort to piracy to crack the firmware in their big, expensive John Deere tractors, because the built-in software prevents “unauthorized” repairs. That means if something goes wrong, only John Deere dealers and authorized service centers can work on it.

BMW’s subscription model also raises questions about their long-term viability. What happens if BMW decides to end service support? Maybe it will release an unlock patch (which you might have to pay for, again), but maybe he decides it’s not economically viable and just pulls the plug. Regardless of which path it (or any company) takes, relying on the company’s goodwill for the continued functionality of a product you’ve bought and paid for isn’t a smart or sustainable consumer strategy.

Heated seats don’t quite fall into the same category as “the machine my livelihood depends on has died in the middle of the cornfield and the nearest repair center is an hour away and has a backlog until next Tuesday.” But they both reflect the increasingly mainstream ways in which the digital world intersects the physical world, and signify the ugly consumerist future we are building for ourselves.