Don’t Buy A New BMW Because I’m Still Mad They Shove Ads At You

You know what’s kind of fun? Being angry. Indignantly angry. Righteous anger, vented with gusto and vigor, and more than a little sprayed saliva. It’s cathartic! It feels good to vent! And oh boy, do I get to vent on the podcast this week, as I rage fecklessly against the miserable practice of pumping ads into your car’s center stack screen, an atrocity most recently committed by BMW as they shoved a Spider-Man movie trailer into BMW owner’s faces.

I’m cross about this sort of thing, so very very cross. Your car is your own little island of solitude in a chaotic world, a cocoon of comfort, and the last thing you need is to have yet more advertising blasted at you.

You’re paying for your car! A hell of a lot of paying, especially in the case of BMW! It’s such a kick in the nuggets to be paying for a premium land-motorcraft, and then it starts to try to sell you some crap – that’s the sort of thing that you get when you, say, sign up for the lowest-tier streaming service subscription or something, not

I’ve gone over this before in some detail, I realize, but I haven’t done it verbally, so you can hear the tired resignation in my voice, at least not yet. But that’s where our podcast, Carbage Time, which you can listen to right here, comes in:

Listening is great, sure, but what if you want to listen and see, see the veins bulging in my forehead, the way my eyes unfocus when I’m ranting, and the subtle look of dismay on Matt’s face as the realization that his professional fate is tied to me slowly dawns on him? What then?

Well, in that case, you can watch our podcast here!

In the podcast, I mentioned a hideous, dystopian idea I had about 20 years ago, and how painfully plausible it feels today. It was an idea for how one could make free hearing aids, as long as the person who uses them agrees to hear three minutes of ads blasted into their ears at twice normal volume every hour.

It was a nightmarish concept. This was before every tiny device had an internet connection, so I had thought the ads could be stored in flash memory in a unit with the battery, getting replaced every month, and new ads would be on the battery/ad pack.

A modern version would just have a cell connection to stream the ads. Either way is horrible, and, really, not so different from having ads played on your car’s dash. Except at least in the case of the hypothetical hearing aid, you’re still getting something (hearing) for free. In your car? You’re still making payments and you’re getting served ads. You get nothing.

If BMW is going to send ads to your dashboard, you should have to pay less for your car. Period. Our attention isn’t free, and they know that, because that’s what they’re selling: our attention. But that’s not what’s happening, and I’m sick of it.

I go over all this in the podcast. Give it a listen! Maybe you’ll find it a bit cathartic as well? Yell along with me! To listen to more podcast episodes, you can go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or you can use the RSS feed and point your favorite podcast player at it.

The post Don’t Buy A New BMW Because I’m Still Mad They Shove Ads At You appeared first on The Autopian.