“In 2022, executives at BMW came upon a brilliant, if perverted, idea to extract more money from their customers,” Michigan attorney Steve Lehto told me in an interview. He has practiced in the fields of lemon law and consumer protection for over 30 years and hosts Lehto’s Law, a highly educational YouTube program. “They wanted to start charging customers $18 a month for subscription-based access to heated seats and, later, for using the remote-start feature — many of the things their cars already came with.”
Due to enormous pushback, BMW dropped the heated-seats fee in September. (Lehto notes that these fees are not the same as the ones people pay for SiriusXM satellite radio service, which is similar to your cable TV bill.)
