are_62

I picked up my new 525d last Wednesday. It came from Germany with a voice recognition that only understood German. After 3 days of getting it ready, the dealer told me that it took too long to program the voice recognition from German to English and asked me to come back today (Saturday). The programming should only take one hour.

I took the car in today as agreed with BMW and waited patiently. After one hour they told me that changing the language requires "the whole car to be reprogrammed"... ... and that it would take an additional 3 hours. I left and came back three hours later. They now said that changing language is a very big job and I waited another 2 hours.

Then... after 6 hours in total with the car today (plus the 3 days they already had it, they are still not finished and that the car now needs to stay there since they are in the middle of the programming. They asked me to come back the next day (tomorrow) since he estimated the programming to take another 3 hours!

I am VERY concerned. Not only is this my first weekend with new car and a chance to take it for a drive, but I have no confidence the mechanic knows what he is doing. The strange things is that this is a major BMW dealer and that one would think they had done this before.

I will not buy that a) the entire car has to be reprogrammed to change the language or b) that it takes this many hours. What is he doing? What can the man possibly be programming for that many hours?

Sorry about the rant everyone. I'm just not pleased. They gave me a BMW 116 as a loaner (they gave it to me with just enough gas to get to the gas station)... not quite the same.

Does anyone know what is involved in changing languages in the voice recognition? Should I be concerned that incompetent fingers are learning computer basics on my car? (gasp!)

maszika

Hi,

i have BMW garage in Hungary (not official but since 20 years). We have all Programming device for BMW.
Change the language for Voice recognition must flash the all CCC virtuelle ECU with new program. Only the CCC ( CCC-GW, CCC-ASK, CCC-BO, CCC-ANT, CCC-A ) need apr.181 min for flashing. (per optocable). + Initialising (apr. 30 min) When your car is not on the newest Software (V23.1, I-Stufe:E060-06-09-520 ), must before Languagechange all other ECU with the aktuell Software flashen.

Janos from hungary

525iSE

I would rather take the dealer to another car and write a complain to your region's BMW. It shouldn't take like 3 days to program the damn car. BMW dealers sometimes really piss me off because sometimes they have no clue what they say to customers, they have no clue about the new because they don't bother to learn it, but instead learn as they go with problems with customers' cars. are_62, they are learning and experimenting with your car, bring it to another dealer who can guarantee that they can get it done in a day. Its the best idea.

Another quick complain about BMW dealer, this is awhile back but, let me complain here so other BMW owners know about it, there is a specific dealer, in Thailand who did this to my brother, but I won't mention which. He bought the E46 without xenons, so I replaced it with xenons headlights, which required a quick reprogramming, being a first time BMW owner, we left the car there for a whole day. Programming took a whole day just to get the car to recognize the xenons. On top of that, they took out our headlight washer tank, and replaced it with a f***ing old one that was repaired and was leaking. After putting water in the headlight washer tank three times in three days, we took to another dealer and found out it was not the original tank and someone had taken ours. They found this through a lot of processes, but in the end they guarantee that ours was taken and given an old one. One problem.

One that just happened to me recently is they took my right headlight, and replaced it with one that is smeared with glue, apparently one that have been taken apart, so I'm looking into getting it replaced since now its all fogged up anyways, on both sides, so I'll just get them to repalce mine. Sorry for "hijacking" the post, but that is my problem with leaving my car at BMW dealer. So please take your car to another dealer, and wait for the job to be done. Hope it works out for you bro...

Rudy

It wouldn't be surprised that the entire car to requires programming for a language change. There are many modules tied together, etc. -- as you probably know, this car is extremely compex both with hardware and with software.

Programming the entire car usually does, in fact, require a whole day (I think they spec it at 4 hours but there are usually issues that arise which sometimes causes the update to crash which forces the technician to start all over again.)

I wouldn't be too concerned (yet) with the situation. Most of us here have learned through our collective experiences that many dealers are a bit clueless when it comes to programming, etc. and we've also seen countless instances where the software updates take multiple days to accomplish.

At this point, my only surprise is that the dealer was stupid enough to keep stringing you along by telling you just another hour or two, etc. If they are as large as you imply, they should have been able to easlily determine that the language switch required a major software upgrade and they should have known that it would be an all day affair...

Hang in there and good luck!

JayM

Hi

Sorry to hear about your experiences...
My car came also with German voice recognition. My dealer reprogrammed my car in one day (I think it took about 6 hours). Besides getting English voice recognition RDS did not work well.

My car is a 04 525IA Touring with professional Nav...

Regards

JayM

are_62

Thanks for the replies everyone. I then do understand that the job taks a while to perform. I'm happy that I asked so that I'm not totally dissing the poor mechanic tomorrow.

Jay: Should RDS be a part of the professional radio package? I noticed today that I don't have it either. In Norway, RDS is almost a must due to mountains and short range of FM transmitters. I had it on my 520i. I do have the professional radio and surprised that RDS is not active...

JayM

I also live in Norway...

As far as I know RDS is standard. My problem with the RDS was that it IDrive displayed the wrong station name. After the software update the RDS is working as expected

I don't know what CIP version you've got but here is another forum member w/o RDS
http://forums.e60.net/index.php?showtopic=19083&hl=rds

It will probably work out when you get your car back after the software upgrade. I don't know what CIP version I got, but it is probably 22 something since I got my car upgraded in August this year.

JayM