RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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What does a roughly $100,000 BMW 7 Series get you? With a few taps on the sedan’s massive touch screen, you can play Pac-Man or let the car park itself. Last week, BMW added a new feature to its infotainment system: When drivers start up their car, they are greeted by the following message: “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped on your BMW!”
Click on the prompt, which appears in most BMWs made after 2020, and the touch screen is taken over by a commercial for Spider-Man: Brand New Day , the latest movie in the Marvel franchise. The video is accompanied by blinking lights inside the vehicle. Though drivers can choose to skip the ad, it persists as an app on their car’s display.
Many BMW drivers have not been thrilled by this uninvited pitch for Peter Parker. “Stupid and annoying and totally unnecessary,” one user posted on a BMW Reddit forum. “Wtf am I getting an ad? How is that appropriate in a vehicle?” wrote another. In an email, Phil DiIanni, a BMW spokesperson, told me that the ad is part of a broader partnership between BMW and Marvel, which has included placing a tricked-out Spider-Man-themed SUV on the red carpet during the movie premiere, last week. “The animation is available for a limited time and only visible to drivers who proactively initiate it on their vehicle’s touch screen,” he said.
A few other carmakers, such as Stellantis, have attempted in-car advertising before in the United States, but not a luxury brand like BMW. Regardless of what you drive, your car might be next. That’s because—to use the automotive world’s favorite cliché—cars are becoming “smartphones on wheels.” No longer is your vehicle a static piece of machinery governed by physical switches and buttons. This comes with many benefits. The modern, digital car can get better over time by virtue of its software: Over-the-air updates deliver new features that weren’t available when you bought the vehicle.
But with great connectivity comes great responsibility. When carmakers can beam code (and content) into our cars, they have more control over our time and money. The tech industry’s most grating strategies are invading the car.
[ Read: My car is becoming a brick ]
You might already be feeling one downside of smartphones on wheels: subscription fees. Though drivers have already spent decades paying for in-car communications systems, such as OnStar, monthly subscriptions have proliferated. My Tesla wants me to pay $10 a month for “premium connectivity” to access Spotify or Netflix through the touch screen, adding a monthly payment on top of the monthly payment I already pay to access those services outside the car. Self-driving features in Tesla vehicles require an ongoing monthly plan . Subscription fees aren’t always limited to software. In 2022, BMW itself announced that, in countries including the U.K. and South Korea, drivers would have to pay $18 a month to activate the heated seats already built into cars. (The company canceled the plan when customers revolted.)
In-car advertisements are the obvious next step. Cars are the perfect vehicle for this phenomenon because their passengers are quite literally stuck. You can put down your phone if the ads get too annoying, but you can’t just forgo driving the kids to school because your SUV is hounding you to watch a movie trailer. (BMW does allow drivers to permanently disable the pop-ups.) If the automotive industry continues to follow in the footsteps of Big Tech, it’s not hard to see where this goes from here: Soon, you might face targeted ads based on where you drive or Netflix-like tiers that ask you to pay to go ad-free. Serenity inside one’s car, something that was once a given, may become a luxury good.
Carmakers have plenty of reasons to do all of this. New-car prices have reached an average of nearly $50,000, and Americans may be reaching a breaking point . Auto companies facing tariffs, Chinese competition, and even a computer-memory shortage may nickel-and-dime you with subscriptions and ads to keep car prices under control, squeezing money from drivers long after the car is off the lot.
In this way, the auto industry has generated one more thing that’s already widespread with digital technology: nostalgia. Like users fleeing the constant distractions of their devices for a flip phone that does less, plenty of drivers already resent the way cars have ditched physical buttons and routed features such as climate control through a touch screen. But a low-tech new car is hard to find.
Sooner or later, Americans must come to terms with the fact that our machines are not always ours. In that sense, BMW’s Spider-Man ad is eerily reminiscent of another awkward tech collab: In 2014, Apple announced that U2’s new album would be automatically downloaded to hundreds of millions of iPhones without owners’ permission. At the time, the incident starkly illustrated the company’s power. Today that affair seems almost quaint. BMW’s in-car commercial may look tame compared with what comes next.
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