I like to change scale on the nav while driving to see roads and their names. It's neat to see the arrow fly accross the screen at high magnification. In my system, maximum magnification is 400 ft scale., then it is 800 ft. I read in the manual you can change scale via voice recognition. It didn't work except for the 1/4 mile or higher scale. Then, as usual one time, by accident, I heard the male nav voice say 'scale 200 meters'. I used that sentence as a voice command and it brought up the map in 800 ft scale. I tried scale 100 meters, and got the 400 ft scale map. Now I can jump back and forth in scale without having to remember the iDrive knob needs to be turned the opposite way I expect it to.

BTW, I find if I rest my hand on the Steptronic shifter, it too easily jumps into DS and is no longer in a comfortable location. I cannot comfortably rest my right arm on the small center arm rest. If I rest my hand over the iDrive to change scale, it is too much time to return the hand to the wheel for a quick correction. The voice recognition is my best solution; unless I can build a better arm rest.

sg: Thanks. That's a great tip. These commands are missing from the list I made up and posted a couple of weeks ago. Can you please list out all the possible 'meter' options, so I can keep the master list up to date? Does that include 'feet' or just 'meters'? Thanks.

Now, re: your shifter being too easy to move in to DS... We should not be resting our hand on the shifter. This prevents the handle/lever from vibrating freely and will reduce the life of an automatic transmission (don't have an article reference; my dad (rally driver) and two mechanics have told me this). It's not meant as an armrest; I understand and sympathize that the included one isn't comfortable for you and many others. But don't replace this with the shifter.

Sam

Without going back to check, I can say that no 'feet' command was ever recognized. The only English units that were recognized were mile fractions and miles.
BTW, has anyone noticed that the miles of travel left on a tank of gas (BC info) after startup, after gassing up, starts as kilometers and then after a second or two, goes to miles? I leave the miles to empty on all the time since I can call up mpg anytime but need miles to empty more often. This tells me all computations are likely performed in metric units first and then converted to US. I was amazed at the delay between starting the engine and seeing the proper data display in the proper units after seeing an intermediate calculation.

I see the wrong units every time I start my car in the morning. The odometer, etc. all show Km instead of Mi. Usually, this is during the time the "BMW" screen is being shown on the iDrive. Once the system initializes and shows the "accept" screen, everything changes to the proper units.

What's really strange (and I'm sure related to the many bugs in the software) is that sometimes the BMW screen goes out quickly and sometimes it takes a few minutes to go away and give control back to me.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Yes, the same thing happens to me. Once last week it took a very long time for the BMW screen to go away. It was after I had started driving and had gone for a while. I was worried that somethign was wrong.

-Rob

Add that to the wish list for version 12 fixes, I guess.

What bothers me about the bug is that the PDC screen won't show up until the car finishes initializing so basically, when I back out of my garage in the morning, I only have PDC tone and no visual since I can't wait for the screen to come up. If I did wait, I'd asphyxiate (sp?) my family!

I've noticed that as well. There have been a few times when even the tones take a little while to come on -- after I'm out of the garage.

Have you seen this, too?

-Rob

Hmm, I can't actually remember now. I'll have to take note tomorrow and see what happens.

That may be a programming (dealer level) bug. We had lots of problems with our E39 nav. On one (of the 12) service visits the car came back with metric distances.

Next trip it was back to English. The change effected both the voice and the nav (we have a rather well equiped E39: nav, phone, voice control, pdc, rear airbags, fold down seat, xenon, cold package, premium package, lumbar, premium DSP audio, steptronic).

Rudy/Rob

I have the same behaviour with my vehicle.