BMW Wants To Charge Customers An Annual Fee To Get CarPlay In Their Cars

If you thought that CarPlay was simply upgrading your car’s infotainment system to a CarPlay compatible unit, you’d be right. However, it seems that if you plan on buying a BMW and also want to have CarPlay in your car, then be prepared to fork out an annual subscription fee because that’s what BMW wants to do.

BMW will be charging customers $300 to add CarPlay to your car, which is to be expected and other carmakers will also do the same. However, in its 2019 vehicles and onwards, BMW will be charging customers $80 in annual fees (although the first year will be free) if they want to keep CarPlay in their cars.

We’re not sure if this violates the licensing agreement with Apple, because since it is an Apple product, it is unclear how BMW has the right to charge customers for software that belongs to someone else, especially on an annual basis. It is also unclear if Apple will receive a cut of those proceeds.

It’ll be interesting to see how BMW will be able to justify this, but then again, if you can afford to buy a new BMW, what’s an extra $80 on an annual basis, right?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Transportation
Tags: bmw, carplay, Social Hit