jonathanm1966

On the older E60 that I owned, there were two buttons on the steering wheel that you could assign a function to. I used to have 'Next instruction' from the SatNav, and mobile phone address book - from which I could easily select the number I wanted to call via the I Drive.

I now have a new E60 535d. One of the buttons on the steering wheel is taken up with the Lane Departure warning switch - therefore I only have one option left for the presets.

I intially thought no problem - I can assign one of the eight new assignable buttons, but no...

I can neither assign 'Next satNav message' nor the 'A-Z' phonebook.

Does anyone have any idea how to do either one of these? I only need to have one, beacuse I can put the other on the steering wheel button.

I have tried everything. All suggestions gratefully appreciated.

hythe

Interesting - have always wondered what other people put on their assignable buttons (saddo that I am) - I generally just use it for turning the entertainment system on and off, then use voice control for the other stuff.

Am afraid I can't answer your question, though - my old crate is pre-LCI.

hinckley

You cannot assign a function to the preset buttons per se. You can only assign an item from a list (a radio station, a CD track, a sat nav destination).

The way that I have partially gotten around this is to assign one button for a radio station in the manual selection mode and another button for a radio station in the pre-set mode. That enables me to move from radio mode to radio mode by only pressing a button.

I think that sat nav is more problematic. You can program a destination into a preset button, but pushing that button automatically sets the nav system to go to that destination.

Hope this is understandable and helps at least somewhat.

jonathanm1966

In fact what I do to partially get round the problem is to have the 'Next SatNav' message on the wheel, and press the voice control button when I want to call a specific person - but of course the voice ID doesn't always work.

Rudy

This issue is a minor gripe of mine. As far as the new 'favorites' buttons, I don't understand why BMW thinks we can't handle 8 of them like the rest of the world -- instead, they wasted two of them on 'mode' and 'FM/AM'. The buttons are very useful now but could be way more useful if they could be programmed to take you to any iDrive screen and not just an entertainment source or preset, a telephone number, or a nav destination.

Also, wasting a steering wheel button on the lane deviation warning system is a bad idea. I leave my lane deviation system on all the time. The button, therefore, is never used. If they couldn't find an area to put the switch (like near the headlight switch) then they couldn've just given us a soft switch in iDrive and added it to the list of buttons that could be programmed on the steering wheel.

I have my other steering wheel button programmed to turn on/off the night vision system so basically, I'm out of buttons...