Pay To Drive – Update

In September, I made a post about subscription-based heated seats in select BMW cars. In that post, I mentioned that it won’t be long before more things in the automobile world will be subscription based in years to come. Well, I guess it is “years to come” now.

Mercedes-Benz has started charging owners of its Mercedes-EQ EQE and Mercedes-EQ EQS electric cars $1,200 per year for faster acceleration of their vehicles. Well if you are a speed freak, it isn’t that big of a boost either, we are talking 0-60 mph being reduced by 0.8 or 0.9 seconds.

The really great part of all this is a study by Cox Automotive found that three-quarters of consumers said they were not willing to pay an annual or monthly subscription fee for most items on their new vehicle.

If we all stick together, then car manufacturers will learn like BMW did in 2018, when they tried to make Apple CarPlay a subscription service.