DD_545i

I wonder whether it's worth us compiling a list of what we consider to be bugs in the iDrive system. You never know, if it's presented to them as the combined wisdom of a large number of BMW enthusiasts, then they might take it seriously. It's like the dream focus group for them. Being in software design myself, I'd certainly be interested in such feedback. We software types often have to design systems despite not knowing what it's like to be a user of them and what their needs are.

I guess we can also include minor enhancements listed separately. I'll start things off.

Bug:

As we discovered in another thread today, you can sometimes need to get your car towed just because it "appears" like the brake isn't being pressed when starting the engine but it actually is being pressed and the sensor or switch isn't detecting it. There should be a way to bypass that message as having the brake pressed when you have the parking brake on or you're not in gear isn't adding any safety value anyway. If BMW want to "cover their backs" legally, they could have a message on the iDrive offering the chance to bypass the brake press requirement if the driver accepts/acknowledges that BMW aren't to blame for anything bad that might happen by starting the car. Ideally they simply wouldn't ask for the brake to be pressed if the parking brake is already on and it's not in gear.

Enhancement:

Offer the chance to select whether the RDS "TP" setting applies locally or nationally. When I'm driving "around town" near home, I'm not interested in my CD enjoyment being interrupted by a national radio station's traffic announcement. I'd like to be able to set a "TP mode" of local or national. I'd only select national when I'm travelling a long distance.

Further to the last suggestion, or as an alternative, I'd like to be able to turn on/off the "TP" traffic announcements per radio station.

One final thing, highly relevant in Germany only, is the chance to have "an extra 30 seconds" on the end of the "TP" traffic announcement so that it doesn't switch back to CD too quickly. On German radio stations, right after the traffic report, they always give a speed-camera/radar report of where the police mobile cameras are. Unfortunately the radio stations (I believe legally have to) switch off their RDS TP signal before they get to that part so I always have to scramble to press the next-audio-source button to catch that report. A simple "extra 30 seconds" option would enable us to catch it.

Bring some of those secret-menu items to life in a non-secret informational screen. The engine temps and speed in km/h or mph for example could be displayed.

More options for what the programmable steering wheel buttons can do. The list of six or so items is pretty limited.

or_550i

This might require yet another controller/interface for the iDrive. All of that data can be read from the CAN-BUS but in order to show it on the iDrive would require a controller to act as a listener and allow control from the iDrive. I'm working on something like that at the moment... But it won't be integrated into the iDrive.

DD_545i

Fair enough. Technical barriers like that are understandable. I believe there are some secret iDrive menus though, so any info they have should be available at least.

JaySmuv

I'm not sure on the likelihood of any of the changes getting implemented, but they do have some things they need to work on.

First, they need to hire someone who has experience designing mp3 players. The randomize features of the iDrive are terrible. Randomize is not an action, it's a setting. I should be able to start playing a track with random on and the next track chosen will be random. I have mix CDs and sometimes I want to start with a particular song and then after that I want it to be random (this is trivial with most music players from the very first Discman to the newest iPod).

I should also be able to skip a song and continue my random pattern. Now, if I skip a song, it goes to the next song and turns off random. Skipping a song when in random mode should go to a random song and then continue randomly afterwards.

Album random would also be great. Play one album then randomly choose another. On the iPod, this also works great for mixes, where you have multiple songs per album. It plays all the songs from that album in order and then moves on to another random album.

I don't have an iPod adapter (yet), but it seems that these randomize limitations are there even if you are using an iPod.