[Loek]

Hello all,

I’ve been a proud and mostly very happy owner of a 2014-built F10 LCI 528i for just over a year. The first year was a bit of chasing appointments and inspections but all seems to be in order at the moment and I look forward to a nice long drive to the north of Sweden (starting in Holland).

I have however amassed a few questions about the iDrive system, specifically its data and GPS connections and how they work behind the scenes. Of course the manual does not go into such details. Because it’s an older car, the current generation of mechanics also does not have so much hands-on experience so they have not been particularly helpful in this matter. (Plus, you would probably need more of an IT specialist to deal with these issues.)

The problem:

Very occasionally (5-6 times in the past year) the navigation loses its bearing and the car thinks it’s a few meters off the road, sometimes it even thinks it’s pointing in completely the wrong direction and driving over rivers and further away from its actual location. This is not so annoying but of course it messes with all of the other location-dependent services (traffic info, max speeds etc).

In the past this has resolved itself with time (days) or at random. I have not been able to pinpoint if this is a GPS signal thing (antenna?) or a bug in the iDrive system or in other modules. I think I have been able to prod the system to fix itself by starting up BMW Connect via iDrive and forcing it (?) to make a cellular connection. This might have been a coincidence, I can’t reproduce the fix every time. I have also not been able to force a reset via the volume dial as I have read. So some questions to help me pinpoint/troubleshoot.

1. First of all, does the car use my phone via Bluetooth for its data connection or does it have its own connection? It seems to be the latter, but I cannot figure out whether this is 2G or 3G. I don’t see anything about SIM cards either. Of course I fear that I will lose a lot of functionality once those bands are disabled in the coming year or two.
   
2. Which sources does the navigation use to determine its position? It must have a GPS receiver, does it also use cellular information? Does it use my phone’s location when connected with Bluetooth? There are probably also compasses and gyroscopes on board that determine orientation.
   
3. Does the MyBMW app play any role in this? Does it connect directly with the car via Bluetooth to exchange information or does it just read out via the cloud what the car sends out to BMW’s servers?
   
4. If I were to install an aftermarket “Carplay” module (the kind that preserves the screen and iDrive controller), would it use the (possibly malfunctioning) built-in GPS antenna or would it strictly mirror my phone?

If anyone is a wizard on 12 year-old BMW IT systems I would be very grateful for your insights.

[Snowtown]

Have you coded in the compass feature? Or the xdrive info feature? I can't remember which one, but I remember after coding in one of the features, I had the exact same problem. I was able to fix it by changing a value with bimmercode. I can't remember which one, but if you did code a feature in and now it's acting all crazy, I'll put in the effort to find what value it was

[Loek]

Thanks for your reply! As far as I'm aware there's no custom coding or compass feature.

It happened again last week as I was crossing the border into Germany. I had to get off the motorway and pass through customs on a parking lot. Presumably deviating from the set route is a factor, and knocks the system off course. It took about an hour or two to correct itself this time. It seems the GPS is not checking in regularly enough to correct the gyroscopic (or cellular tower?) signals. But I'm not getting any error messages that I'm aware of. I'm just trying to understand its workings but it's a little frustrating when you're on the spot in a foreign country.