I've noticed the following on mine. I start it in my garage and the climate controls in auto (A/C off), go inside and get my lunch, etc. for the day (takes me about 2 min). When I get to the car..a few mins later, the heat is on but I notice that all of the air is blowing from the top -- not the upper body or the footwell, but the windshield. If it's in automatic climate I don't want to mess witht the iDrive vent settings all the time. So now I start it and set the vents to the bottom and nothing on top. Once the car is totally warmed up (like when I'm almost to my office) I notice that I can turn on the Auto climate and it works fine.

Why is this? Does it assume that I'm outside and it's going to defrost the windshield first? Can anyone shed some light on this?
Thanks in advance.

 

Automatic setting does use some preset algorithms depending on factors can acquire. However, you can customize the vent settings to some degree. The information is in your owner's manual (also available on-line in the information section of this forum).

 

Thanks...I had already gone over that (several times!). It just seems like the Auto feature initially puts all of the heat to the windshield and there's really no way to customize that --- except taking it out of Auto.