Between this, the proprietary nut patent, and the heated seat subscription, I'm probably not going to look at BMW for my next car. They've been going back on things, but all of this adds up to they don't get it.
Ryanair's whole shtick is "we'll treat you like cattle in a truck, and you'll be grateful you only paid €20 for the experience". I feel that anyone who is outraged by their nickel-and-diming doesn't really understand what Ryanair is about.
If I paid €200 for a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam, and they forced me to watch ads on the seatback screen and charged me to use the loo, then I'll be rightfully upset. But €50 for Ryanair? Where do I sign up for the €20 standing-only tickets?
I once flew from London Stansted (or maybe it was Luton?) to Dublin instead of from Heathrow with Aer Lingus to save a few bucks, and it never ended up saving me anything in the end.
With Aer Lingus the cheapest ticket includes 10kg of checked luggage, which is a nice middle ground between a tiny bag you can shove under your seat and a 23kg luggage
And Ryanair are not even cheaper most of the time unless you're prepared to fly at unsocialable times and forgo luggage.
Ryanair even seem to deliberately separate seats for adult passengers on the same booking so they can charge you extra to sit together...
Pushing advertisment after sale on a premium product is absolutely not similar.
‘Enjoy your “luxury“ car’, the kind of “luxury“ that appeals to subsidized e-reader buyers and discount airline customers.
And I like that. If BMW can’t resist monetizing their customers’ attention, they don’t deserve the higher-end customers their marketing suggests they desire.
Also I think everyone in our social circles have flagship phones but $50 Android pre-paids sell pretty well. (Someone probably knows, unlike me, the exact numbers.)
Praise be to AdBreak https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/AdBreak
I practically own it now!
Ryanair: can’t recall if they’re worse than Spirit/Frontier. “We have one price for tiny people flying with the shirt on their back, and other prices for everyone else like those who might need luggage, or, liquid to survive.“
I bought a Series 7 BMW once, went to Munich to pick it up with my GF, the electronics died three lights away from the factory. Just giving me a new one? Nope. Had to go home without a car.
I never heard anyone say, ‘Man, I’d not buy another brand than BMW again in my life.’
And I feel the people in the 21st century finally called the German engineering bluff and are now driving Chinese cars that are more innovative, a lot cheaper and basically German engineering too, after china stole all of the trade secrets.
BMWs are no where near for that "class". A Mercedes-Benz is for that and even they also put ads in their own dashboard screens. [0]
So on HN-land, time to rule out BMWs, Chevrolets, Mercedes-Benz, Teslas, Volkswagens, Kias. What else?
[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/797846/mercedes-screen-plays-ads...
Mercedes may have a car or two that reaches just out of upper middle class but they are largely a middle to upper middle class brand, just like BMW.
The fact that Merc would do it too just means they are both happy cheapening their brand to align with practices of cheap off-brand android TVs.
- The Settings: Apple Intelligence and Apple Fitness+ (including the red dot as if you missed something important).
- The app store. Typically 1/2 or 2/3 of the search page is covered by ads.
- Apple Wallet. They rolled out an F1 advertisement to Apple Wallet in some region.
- iWork apps now have advertisements for updating to an Apple Creator Studio subscription.
- Apple Maps will soon have ads.
Most restraint is gone now to grow the Services category. It just feels gross for flagship devices. It seems that AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS are the only road to sanity.
Edit: Just read that Toyota is toying with the idea of an electric Starlet. It'll probably have an infotainment system and power "everything" though.
My current car had an electrical issue last year... but it turned out it was a mechanical issue. Something had chewed through the wires to the MAF sensor. Fixed them, and all good. It's no different from something chewing through a fuel line, except OBD was able to tell me what subsystem was not working correctly.
The problem I see with current cars is that the infotainment system is tied into everything - and usually the software sucks. If they just went back to seperate dashboard, AC controls and radio I'd have no issues with them.
My current car is from 2016, and I specifically looked for something that was like that. It is hybrid and has modern tech (e.g. radar cruise control), but everything is compartmentalised. First upgrade I did was replacing the headunit with a Chinese one that supports Android Auto/CarPlay. No functionality was lost, as the old head unit was literally just a radio and screen for backup camera.
Lucky for Big Brother they’ve blanketed this country (USA) in Flock cameras. New car, old car, they’re ready to pull over journalists in dealer loaners, people in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Not sure how common it is for Verizon, AT&T, Google (Maps), Apple (Maps) to sell to insurers (or brokers who insurers use). Perhaps pretty common? I’m sure they often can deanonymize it if they do.
Lexus should put that on the cover of their product brochure.
EDIT Add Volvo and Genesis to the list of no ads
I'm wondering what a good cutoff date is when considering buying a used car.
An ad for a spiderman movie has no upside and is another small step towards a Minority Report vision of the future.
In the eu, the general idea is "you can disable the functions each time you restart the car - they will be re-enabled as the car is off".
Some people spend minutes turning off the annoying parts from the settings before starting the car, each time.
It's super "fun" with temporary marking around road works. I bet it works perfectly in a lab but in the real world..
And near cyclists...
(Opposite to some configurations described nearby, some car models do automatically steer pushing the car in its lane, they do not just warn the driver.)
Apparently not all cars have collision avoidance towards the sides. The combination of HW and SW features now varies.
Coming to you thanks to the assholes who fiddle on their phone while driving. As a cyclist, I still see this happening regularly where car drivers are fiddling on their phone while driving for just a few seconds, leading to almost-collisions (well, probably I've been lucky to only witness almost-collisions, including almost getting hit myself), etc.
Same problem on bikes and electric bikes. People are so attached to their screens that they are fiddling on their phone while cycling. This was already bad when people cycled 15 km/h on a regular bike, but now we have kids who cycle on a fat bike with the 25 km/h speed limit removed, tinkering on their phone while cycling 35 km/h in small city streets. Not surprisingly, accidents have gone up a lot.
I hate in-car cameras as much as you. But I also hate the totally irresponsible use of phones while driving/cycling.
The eu has started pushing those things with a 2016 (I believe) regulation that imposed "all cars approved for production after 2018 must have an "e-Call" system (internal GPS, microphone and telephone connected to the police in case of car crash)".
And then more, and then more, and still more...
cutoff is officially mid 2024. I don’t know if some older cars have been firmware-updated to have these features turned on by default.
These decision makers are meant to be educated people with may be at least a tiny bit of values in their lives...
For me the biggest annoyance are pushing ads (and the pervasive monitoring that comes with it) to devices where screens are integral to the device and therefore unavoidable, like TVs, smartphones, computer displays, etc. We haven't connected our TV to WiFi (like any TV nowadays you have to be very careful that it doesn't enable a service like Samba that screenshots what you are viewing), but I'm sure these people will do anything to get their hands on analytics and screen time by embedding cellular modems and whatnot.
Similarly, at least on Android phones, you can git of a lot of crap with adb. But Android 17 removes the possibility to uninstall apps from the 'user partition' (you can only disable), I wouldn't be surprised if they also remove disabling in the future, so there will be no way to get rid of all the spyware and crap ware. Yes, alternative ROMs do not have this issue, but they get increasingly blocked out with Play Integrity.
This is not the future we should want.
That one got a chuckle out of me
It's so ugly that they first sell cars, and profit from that. And then they utilize the fleet of cars to squeeze out more revenue, even though that was never part of the contract to begin with. What right does BMW have to do that?
If they found a new revenue source, it would be nice if they at least shared that with their customers. Now it's just abuse of their customers. Where BMW is one-sided profiting while the customers are suffering.
No.
[0] https://www.theautopian.com/bmw-is-showing-commercials-on-th...
https://www.motortrend.com/news/bmw-80-of-1series-owners-don...
I would put up the car for sale, and would never drive a BMW again. I’d go by bus until my new car arrives.
Pops don't disappear with software updates. Pops disappeared in Europe because of the dreaded OPF.
on suitably equipped vehicles running BMW Operating System 7, 8, 8.5, 9, or OS X built after July 2020
For those who were surprised by that naming, Apple hasn't used "OS X" for nearly 10 years.
This one doesn’t seem right to me since it’s a recent popular post w/o a previous popular post.
The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see ourselves interacting with our users.
Went to an official repairs shop for a device yesterday, said I had a backup device with a malfunctioning (for clinical reasons) OS. The technician replied that OS downgrade is inhibited.
And there are similarities. For example, after laws that forbid circulation of older vehicles upon "non-ecological" reasons. For example, if they stop producing replacement parts. Etc.
And anyway, if the basis of Economics is not rebuilt, that of a "violent" Demand side with a strong refusal against the Supply side, the damage will be even more than the already critical one of unacceptable products eating u the market.
Stop the presses, it's not an ad, it's just a “festive animation”!
I only take it out maybe 20 times per year, but after merely 30s behind the wheel I remember why I keep it.
When a basic sedan weighs 1700kg, you can't fool physics - it's never going to corner or respond like it's predecessor of half that weight.
and even looking at them is safe only seen they are parked, I warned my kids to be extra vigilant when they are nearby BMW on the road, by far the most dangerous drivers on the road with mental issues
similar thing happened with that British LGBT brand, which is gone
though it's clear people who buy BMW are not mentally sane anyway, I'm yet to see BMW driver with stable personality who would not vent their mental issues on the road, these people will buy BMW with literally any design and specs just because it's BMW, no matter it looks like ugly tank
I honestly believe if we banned BMW car registrations number of accidents would drop much more than it's their total share on registrations.
1. DAF 4,67%
2. MAN 3,60%
3. Iveco 2,99%
4. Mercedes-Benz 1,53%
5. Volvo 1,34%
6. BMW 1,04%
7. Audi 1,02%
8. Fiat 0,89%
9. Renault 0,86%
10. Volkswagen 0,83%
Guess which of these brands doesn't sell trucks (just a little bit hint - Mercedes and Volvo sell a lot of trucks in Europe) and you will get number one among passenger cars from one brand which doesn't sell trucks and cause the most accidents followed unsurprisingly by Audi.
https://www.garaz.cz/clanek/servis-auto-cisla-statistiky-vin...
different chart from 2025 from CEBIA in Czechia, company checking whether car was crashed and their findings, percentage of cars they were checking and which actually crashed, though this one just says percentage out of verified cars, it must be noted that Skoda/Toyota are extremely popular in Czechia, so they are also more likely to have accidents:
Audi 69,69 %
BMW 68,82 %
Škoda 64,37 %
Toyota 63,87 %
Mercedes-Benz 62,27 %
Hyundai 61,95 %
Volvo 58,59 %
Volkswagen 56,02 %
Seat 55,02 %
Mazda 54,78 %
https://autosalon.tv/novinky/ojetiny/10-nejcasteji-bourajici...