I can keep reading this term, often associated closely with active steering. What is servotronic? And am i really lucky that BMW has it?

Thanks

Servotronic varies the level of power assistance, according to road speed.

Active steering varies both the level of assistance and the physical steering ratio (the system uses a mechanically linked but electrically adjustable planetary gearset to vary the amount of steering provided for a given input), again according to road speed.

Servotronic is good, but active steering takes things to another level - it's awesome.

My current car (E60 530d SE) has Active Steering and Dynamic Drive - and the Active Steering has always been pretty flaky. Sometimes it will pop up an error message to say it is inactive when I am driving along. Sometimes if I start the car and turn the wheel hard to one side and reverse, it will do the same thing. When this happens, the wheel is normally no longer centred and the indicators don't self cancel anymore.

The fault normally goes away again if I centre the wheels and turn the car off and on again a few times - but sometimes it doesn't and I am left without the Active steering for a day or so before it magically fixes itself. This happens probably once a month or so.

The car has had 4 replacement steering control modules over 4 years, and exhibited the same behaviour with each one. Of course, it's not something that the dealer could ever replicate.... I've just learned to live with as one of the quirks of this car. It was one of the first in the UK with active steering, so maybe it's more reliable now.

On my new car, I deliberately didn't order the Active Steering....maybe I will miss it, maybe I won't - time will tell. I also didn't order the Dynamic Drive as I can't really feel it doing much to the car even under hard cornering (is it even still offered as an option - I couldn't find it on the BMW car configurator?) and I hope that the M-Sport suspension and the self levelling feature of the e61 rear end will give a better (sportier, not softer) drive anyway.