BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat

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.

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.

Why BMW car owners not use LLM(s) to determine what portion of the software running in their legally owned cars is downloading those videos and block them?

I don’t have one of those cars but I asked Mythos and it replied saying:

> Under Settings → Connectivity, you can disable ConnectedDrive services and mobile data. No connection, no ads. You lose: real-time traffic, connected navigation, remote lock/unlock and climate, OTA updates, remote diagnostics, and possibly stolen-vehicle assistance.

It also pointed me to these two projects:

• https://bimmercode.app

• https://bimmerlink.app

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.

Where's my sledgehammer?

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.

Adblockers for cars?

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.

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

211 points | 148 comments

Wow amazing

I would drive straight back to the dealership and return it

Yet another reason not to buy a BMW.