For some time now, users have been reporting that advertisements for car subscription plans have been appearing on their infotainment system.
Imagine the situation: you are driving home in your car. It’s lunchtime, you’re tired, you stop at a set of traffic lights, and you see an advert on your infotainment system offering you a car subscription plan. Now stop imagining it, because it’s already happening in Stellantis cars. Specifically, it has come to light as a result of complaints from users of Jeep vehicles.
“Buy peace of mind”. The controversy arose when a user shared a photo on Reddit showing a full-screen advert in which the brand urges us to “buy peace of mind”. Of course, peace of mind is the last thing anyone would feel when paying for a car and an on-screen advertisement, but this user’s Grand Cherokee with UConnect says in the advertisement:
“FlexCare Extended Care Premium Plans are factory-backed and give you peace of mind in the event of a mechanical breakdown. Click the “Call” button to speak to a specialist. Odometer reading must be less than 57,936 km to purchase.
One problem. If you have more than 57,936 kilometres on your account, you will see an advertisement that will do you no good. If you don’t have them, it interrupts an action, such as searching for something in the music system or checking an address in the GPS. There is a cross in one of the corners that you can use to close the pop-up window, but it is clear that the situation has got out of hand.
This is annoying because you might want to use the screen to do something quick and specific and then have to look for a symbol to close the pop-up. In addition, users report that these advertisements appear every time you stop the car. And some of them do it with a software glitch.
It feels. This is not the first time someone has complained about this, but it may be the loudest. There have been two reactions. When a user shared his surprise about it on the Jeep enthusiast forum “4xeforums”, the JeepCares service responded by saying that it was sorry for the frustration, that it recommends that customers click the x and delete the previous messages. However, that “the ads are part of a contractual agreement with Sirius XM”.
The website Carscoops contacted Stellantis and a spokesperson confirmed that this is an announcement designed to inform Jeep customers “about the availability of extended vehicle care”. What about the software failure? Well, the options to make the ad disappear include a bell, an “x” and an “OK”. The problem is that there seems to be a bug that has rendered clicking “OK” useless, but Stellantis has also confirmed to Carscoops that they’re working on getting the bug fixed.
Drive commented that it is possible to disable these pop-ups, but that it is necessary to go to the Jeep Connect website, create a user account with an email address and a password, and then go to the section that allows you to disable pop-ups. The strangest thing is that in a controversial case, a user comments that he has not seen an advert in two years, but last week he reached the mileage and the advert started popping up.
Fatigue. Finally, the main problem is the so-called subscription fatigue problem. Countless services now operate on a subscription basis, even if they don’t need to, and in the case of car advertising, it’s like Prime Video advertising: it’s not a cheaper rate, but advertising added on top of the rate you had before. And it is clear that the automotive industry is looking for a more stable cash flow than the one it has from vehicle sales alone.
There are many cases of subscriptions unlocking features in cars, such as BMW’s $80/year for CarPlay (originally $300), Mercedes’ annual subscription that allowed it to increase the angle of the rear steering wheel for more than €400/year, or Klim’s intelligent airbag.
An American problem. This is not so much an advertisement as a business model promoted by many companies in this sector. However, it seems to be localised in the US with its own subscription and insurance programme.
Jeep and the Stellantis Group are important in both the European and Spanish markets. We contacted the Jeep representative in Spain, who confirmed that he did not know anything. “Spain is part of the European G5, one of Jeep’s strongest markets, and this is not something that applies or that we have been informed of”, they confirmed. And this is extrapolated to the rest of Europe.
So, although the Group itself confirmed a few years ago that subscriptions would be very important in its business model, in Spain there is no need to worry yet about the introduction of advertising on car screens.
