[RSouthern]

Remember when we all laughed at BMW for trying to charge for seat heaters and other options? I think the joke would have been on them if that had persisted because today I tried to renew the connected services that came with the vehicle and I couldn’t. BMW can’t take my money.

Let me explain in hopes that someone from BMWNA reads this thread and can fix their broken process. So the way that the car has a primary and secondary driver applies to the account following the car too. But I bet you didn’t know that only the primary account holder/driver can pay for the services! My wife is the primary driver of our X7 (making her primary on the account too) and doesn’t want to deal with the web portal or the tech except the app to pre-cool or pre-heat the car, depending on the weather. She leaves the rest to me since I care and do all the maintenance stuff for her and the rest of our fleet. I’m the secondary driver on our X7.

Why wouldn’t BMW accept payment from a user associated to the vehicle? Why force the primary driver/user to be the person who pays the bills too, especially in family situations? Case in point #2, my daughter drives and manages her i3 via the app for lock checks and precooling, she lives 400 miles away. I pay the bills for her too. Do I need to be the primary driver and account holder for all the BMWs in the family? In BMWs solution, apparently I do. This doesn’t make sense to me and is a pain in the backside to have to sort out later.

Just talking to BMW on the phone to see if they would accept payment over the phone (the web portal clearly states that only the primary can pay and won’t let me do anything as the secondary online) and after waiting on hold for an hour, finally spoke with a customer service guy that confirmed it’s company policy and above his pay grade. He was unable to accept payment. Oh, and they don’t do an auto-renewal like everyone else in the service industry because someone complained and if you pay early, the service starts from that date, not the date that the expiring service ends. So don’t pay early if you are the primary (and don’t pay late either since you won’t be able to do anything remotely via the app until you do pay). This is a mind-bogglingly stupid way to run a service.

To BMWNA: when someone is trying to give you money for a service renewal or service start, take their money! It might be a parent or spouse paying for something for their loved ones or maybe a gift from someone to make their car more enjoyable. You will turn away customers and/or profits with this current system, unless that’s what you want.

[patrikr]

While I agree that it shouldn’t be this way, promoting a user to Primary should be easy. In the app, scroll down to and tap on “User Management”, then the three dots next to the user you want to promote to Primary and tap on “Transfer Primary User Role”.

I haven’t tried this myself but the option is there so hopefully it works.

[thenew3]

Primary user is assumed to be the "Owner" of the vehicle and as such gets to make decisions about what services to purchase/subscribe and pay for.
BMW isn't alone in this, other mfgs do it the same way, if you have multiple user profiles, only the primary can make changes to the account (i.e. add or renew subscriptions).

[Ex_Stig]

Just log in as your wife and pay for the service on her account. Seems like you could have done that in the same amount of time it took you to write the original post.

[RSouthern]

appreciate the input... I would have logged in as her, but she hasn't logged into the account since we got the X7 4 years ago and doesn't remember her password and it's difficult to motivate her to go through the PW recover process. I'm not even sure if she has that email account still or which one of several she used.

It just seems odd that I can't pay for something on the car as a secondary user. I get why there may be limitations in turning things off and all that, but renewing a subscription seems like an easy case of "maintaining status quo" so it's unlikely anyone would complain if things kept working like they used to. I mean if they want to be security minded, send a code to the car, like a 2FA method, to prove I have physical access to it, although I wonder how many people are running around spending $150 a pop to enable strangers car's features.

And yes, it was a long post, but I was on hold for an hour and was venting a little. It's therapeutic?