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Yet another reason not to buy a BMW.
Wow amazing

I would drive straight back to the dealership and return it

13 hours ago: "BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising" (consumerrights.wiki)

211 points | 148 comments

BMW: The Ultimate Advertising Machine
I have seen the bar at the top appear with "BMW has a surprise for you" or something, but I always use Android Auto which starts a second later so I have never seen what this was. Still unacceptable.
What a spectacularly efficient means to devalue a once “premium” brand. I guess “good will” didn’t get its own line item on their balance sheet.
Every car given enough time will have ads. Just like every proprietary software will become enshittified. It should be obvious by now that the stock ticker must go up and to do that you have to squeeze your customers. And if they have already bought the car, they have no recourse.

The only solution I see is open-source but for cars, that’s a long ways out.

(comment deleted)
Adblockers for cars?
I have been recently looking at new cars in Europe and there is s massive difference in quality at all price tiers between Chinese and non Chinese cars.

Mind you, Chinese cars are often assembled in Europe and have to comply with all the safety laws etc, but at any price tier it feels you're getting a car that is 10k+ more expensive than it is.

And that's despite EU putting (non sense) sanctions on Chinese cars and components.

If Chinese were free to compete square and fair they would've long swallowed the European industry.

Like look at Volkswagen and what you get at 40k. A non base Golf, maybe?

It also grinds my nerves that European cars are less expensive anywhere but in Europe.

You go to US and they are like 15/20% less expensive.

It’s a slow burn but I feel Europe is heading in a direction where vehicles will play a safety video every time you start up a vehicle, similar to what plays on airlines. Imagine a 3 minute video on rules of the road with no skip function and you have to click ‘agree’ before you can drive. Then you have cameras tracking your eyes, speed etc. They’ll automate license suspensions based on driving style. Maybe you’ll need to scan you license and/or face when the car starts too.

They won’t even be doing this to push people to use public transport. It’s just regular enshittification by big brother.

The great irony of seeing ads in an article about how there is some arbitrary line between “you tracked me for no cost” and “I paid tens of thousands of dollars for this car” when it comes to where ads are no longer acceptable.
At least in the USA, a new BMW is a high-end car. Not a supercar, but beyond the reach of most of the car-buying public. I'm surprised that the generally quite wealthy owners of those cars would tolerate that.
Is there a cookie and gdpr consent bar at the beginning?

In-car adblockers would be nice.

I don't have a car like like that but I heard there's a terms and conditions screen in all internet-connected cars and that the sell agent immediately confirms all checkboxes while getting the car out for the buyer.
return it as you bought it within 14 days if its a BTS vehicle.
This upsets me so deeply in my core that so many companies do this instead of creating anything new for a customer to buy. I can't even process that someone would be mentally disturbed enough to even think of this, and not feel any shame.
If you bought a car with a display instead of physical gauges, what did you expect to happen?
I've driven several BMW's starting in the mid 90's. I recently picked up a used 2017 sight unseen from a dealer pretty far away. It was the only one available I could find that met my criteria.

The car was in superb shape and I'm happy with it, but I knew immediately after driving it that it would be the last BMW I ever purchased. This just seals the deal.

I wonder if advertisement was illegal, would that have effects on the economy other than the advertisement platforms not getting their cut?

I mean, in Europe there are no drug or doctor advertisements and in US there is. In London or Brussels the outdoor advertisements are much more limited than what’s happening in Tokyo or Istanbul. Do Europeans miss out on medicine? Do London business do worse than Istanbul?

I suspect that there’s a case for getting rid of advertisements but on the other hand the advertisement agencies are responsible for some of the greatest advancements in AI and computing, so maybe that’s the utility after all.

My 90s car has no screen. Auto industry needs to self correct before they collapse.
Don’t worry, with the progress in AI we will build BR (for blocked reality) goggles which will obscure anything you have considered possibly objectionable from your environment and replaced it with something innocuous.
All automakers are bad. Hope you like biking a lot. Reports are from 2023 but assume it's gotten even worse.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...

I like biking ok, but where I live it is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter for it to be a good mode of transportation. Even if the roads were better designed for bikers, everything was close enough, etc.
Remember, folks: it's not illegal to remove ads from your car. And it's not illegal to open a business where people can bring their cars and you'll remove ads from them for money. And it's not illegal to wire the seat heaters to a switch on the dashboard.