Your next subscription: auto-start or seat warmers for your car?

Fancy a little more power under the hood of your new Mercedes? For just $1 200 per year, you can add 60 horsepower. Join Audi Connect for around $36 per month, and (among several perks), you can turn your car into a WiFi hotspot. And locally, you can add BMW’s Remote Engine Start for R260 per month.

Software-defined subscription services have arrived in the car industry to provide and enable value-added features to luxury models. Consumer vehicles are not outliers – on-demand software features also appear in agriculture and construction. Nor is this a fad. Software-defined car services are the likely future of the automotive world.