Having an optional subscription to enable the heated steering wheel or adaptive cruise control is bold (and probably a bad idea) because people want what they buy to be 'a good value.'
Tesla has made me believe that software 'eating' cars is the future because, by letting software take over capability from hardware, it allows for software updates to improve earlier models of cars, making them a better value long-term. The marginal cost of improving a car with a software update is essentially nil for the manufacturer.
With that low cost per unit to deploy a software update that improves the car, BMW choosing to hold it hostage and demanding a subscription fee is a bad look, even if it's efficient for them. Having the steering wheel already in the car with the necessary hardware (where the unit cost is for BMW) exposes it as being a feature cheap enough that they can throw the necessary hardware into every model.
Even if it made less economic sense, it would appear more valuable if you were able to go to a BMW dealership and have the steering wheel swapped out for one with heating enabled.
Tesla Model 3 SR+ were originally sold without rear seat heating. Later it became possible to enable it for a fee, via the Tesla app. Few clicks and voilá, suddenly you have rear seat heating.
So every car already had the hardware, obviously because it would be more expensive for Tesla to produce two variants of seat elements.
This model has been around for a long time. I recall a job back in 1997 where I had to add code to permit a service person to enable a feature on a machine. All the machines shipped with the same hardware for the reason you said: manufacturing costs would be too high to make some with and some without.
I had never heard of this before so I asked if it wouldn't piss customers off to see that they were just paying for some guy to come in and enter a code and not to actually install anything physical. The answer was "it never has before." We'd been doing it for years by that point.
Tesla has made me believe that software 'eating' cars is the future because, by letting software take over capability from hardware, it allows for software updates to improve earlier models of cars, making them a better value long-term. The marginal cost of improving a car with a software update is essentially nil for the manufacturer.
With that low cost per unit to deploy a software update that improves the car, BMW choosing to hold it hostage and demanding a subscription fee is a bad look, even if it's efficient for them. Having the steering wheel already in the car with the necessary hardware (where the unit cost is for BMW) exposes it as being a feature cheap enough that they can throw the necessary hardware into every model.
Even if it made less economic sense, it would appear more valuable if you were able to go to a BMW dealership and have the steering wheel swapped out for one with heating enabled.