Last July the Bayerische Motoren Werke car company (BMW) made an announcement that set the business pages of the English-speaking Press alight: it announced that in Britain BMW owners, for only £10 per month, could purchase a heated seat subscription.
Of course every BMW sold already has heating coils in the front seats; the subscription would merely activate them for customers who hadn’t initially bought the option.
(https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html)
Almost every article I read on the subject at the time pointed out the slippery slope, the likely popularity, and the potential cash cow this ‘option’ represents. So yesterday I wasn’t surprised when I read an article on a possible culmination of the trend, featuring a brand new entrant in the electric car market, VinFast from Viet Nam, described as a “Tesla Challenger”. It promises to have a battery subscription as one option: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vinfast-vf8-vf9-battery-subscription-vehicle-pricing-explained/
A trend coming to an automobile showroom near you? Count on it!
I believe we’ve just had a small exposure to the phenomenon ourselves.
When we bought our Golf Wagon TDI in 2011 we were presented with only two options: the “customline” or the “highline”. We chose the less expensive version; our 11 years and 200,000 km of trouble-free experience make a convincing case that for our purposes we had made the right choice. I believe all we had to add were snow tires and a roof rack. VW never once tried to pressure us into adding to the initial package.
And of course, VW’s financial apology for failing to acknowledge that it had cheated on emission tests ultimately made it a very good deal financially as well.
Last November, when we started to see proof that our “solar roof” really was going to reduce our electricity bill to almost nothing we started to get serious about an electric car. After considerable online research, we decided that the Chevrolet Bolt, some writers’ “Electric Car of the Year” in 2017, would probably suit us very well, even though critics were not particularly enamoured of the build and trim. The clincher for me was that the dealer is in downtown Campbell River: I relished the thought of no more time in the waiting room of the dealer in Courtenay which is where I, an owner of two VW vehicles, spent too many hours after my dad, who had lived in Courtenay, died.
So I sent an email, got an immediate response including a spec sheet, went to see the salesman, and put a hold on the first Bolt through the dealer’s doors.
It had a fairly-extensive option list, so not the basic model we had imagined, but it was available when most relatively-affordable electrics weren’t.
We took delivery on August 31, 2022.
Of course after only 2 weeks we already love our Bolt, though there are some significant things to master: 314 pages of “Owner’s Manual” and the steep learning curve dealing with innumerable –– and to us foreign –– systems. But then we remember that we managed to come to terms with our first and subsequent computers, making them do what we wanted, so this does not seem an insurmountable challenge. Already we’ve established that mostly it drives just like a car with an automatic transmission, and we’ve owned a couple of those. And “one pedal” driving is pretty intuitive. So far the hardest lesson has been that you must keep off the accelerator pedal or you’ll be well over the speed limit before you realize there’s a problem.
But this piece really wasn’t supposed to be about the delights of driving Bolts. I started it because I was annoyed by the daily emails from OnStar, GM’s subscription service for most advertised add-ons.
So far we’ve managed to ignore them, and as they will apparently end in a month, they are not a serious impediment to our enjoyment of the car.
Nonetheless.
We signed on to the OnStar system because getting us on was one of our salesman’s jobs, and we liked him. On reading the details, however, we realized we are definitely not interested in being monitored by our car, and all the useful attributes of the OnStar system are adequately covered by a smartphone with the BC Hydro EV app and a BCAA membership.
And no, we cannot do without our BCAA membership. We own a 1992 Volkswagen camper van. It would be madness to have that vehicle and no BCAA membership, as we have discovered on more than one occasion!
(You know what cynics say about VW camper vans: comfortable place to await the arrival of the tow truck. They’re not entirely wrong.)
We don’t either need or want the monitoring either, as today’s example of redundant OnStar monitoring demonstrates: this morning after I got back from ‘Thursday morning coffee with Geoff’ I got two emails, both pointing out that the tire pressures in the car needed attention. Of course they did: the car had been in the OK Tire shop, having the issued summer tires swapped for 4-season radials.
(In fairness, the email did point out that we should ignore the message if the problem was being attended to.)
Some people would be happy to get that message; I find myself decidedly not among them.
Anyway, in our situation that notification doesn’t make much of a case for the program: we can probably tell if a tire needs attention as we have, between us, some 120 years of experience of car operation! We are frankly more concerned by the lack of a spare, replaced by a can of goop to plug the hole and enough pressure to re-inflate the tire. Apparently it’s the contemporary way.
One of the carrots GM Canada advertises for buyers of their electric vehicles is up to $1000 to apply towards the installation of a “2nd level” home charger. Given how slow the charge is on standard 110 house current, that charger, which is 4 or 5 times faster, is pretty-much essential equipment. We clearly needed a charger, so decided to pursue the offer.
But there’s a catch. Turns out that charger must be installed by a “Q merit Electrician” for GM Canada to honour its promise. So I asked Mike of Snowdon Electric, our electrician, who BC Hydro thinks is qualified to install chargers and who has installed at least one other for a Ford product, if he knew what that was. He had no idea.
Mohammed, representing GM Canada, told me that GM has a deal with the “Q merit” organization and that the closest such electrician is in Nanaimo. Mike would only qualify if he became one.
Mike is our son-in-law. He did the wiring for our two mini-split heat pumps several years ago, installed our solar roof and replaced our original electrical panel last fall, and is consequently entirely familiar with our electrical setup. We were determined that he would install the charger, even if that meant more cost to us.
(Of course it wouldn’t actually cost more, because Mike lives in Willow Point so doesn’t have to charge travel time to and from Nanaimo.)
GM Canada eventually and reluctantly sort of conceded our point, and Mike was able to arrange a credit at Tyee Chevrolet for us. A small consideration to make us feel better about being unwilling to access the advertised rebate.
That should complete this phase of the adventure. Time to essay a small voyage at speed to Courtenay and back!
