BMW has put a lot of effort into confusing its customers with these options.

Anybody willing to explain how all these work and what they do?

ConnectedDrive
Online
Assist
Telematics
Teleservices
Tracking

I know I can Google, but BMW website is mostly just a pile of say-nothing corporate-PR junk. The structure of these options and their dependencies is very complicated.

 

Connecteddrive is what BMW use to refer to the systems the car has built in to enable it to communicate and receive information. Originally BMW assist and BMW online were separate options but in late 2007(or 2008 I can't recall 100%) they combined them into one option and renamed the new option Connecteddrive. They still operate within the car as BMW assist and the Online browser.

BMW Assist gives the car the ability to connect to your local BMW service centre to make bookings, a concierge service with some who will answer your query for anything from resteraunts, cinemas, petrol stations etc., etc. and then send the co-ordinates to you car as a message which you can open and view contact details and set as a destination in the satnav. You can also send information yourself to the car either directly from googlemaps as a destination or you can tailor the info you want to send in the connecteddrive website if its just contact information.

BMW Online portal is a webrowser built into the car that will display limited RSS feeds sent to the car ( i.e the weather were you are or news headlines) or theres a limited google search you can use. I don't have this option on my car so can't be to accurate about what it includes and how well it does it.

In the UK you get the first three years of the cars Connecteddrive subscription paid for, then after that its a £120 per year to keep up the service. Its doesn't use your phones data plan the Telematics Control Unit(TCU)has an account with a mobile network and gets the data through that.

Telematics and Teleservices I would assume are just another way of saying the car can communicate via the phone system.

Tracking is when you have a tracker fitted to the car that the police can use when authorised to search for the vehicle, this is normally a separate thing and requires a yearly subscription(in the UK anyway).

 

Thank you for a lengthy post. It's much more clear to me now.

Regarding "Tele", I have found out that Telematics is just a common unnoficial name for a group of options (Assist, Online, Teleservices) in general, while Teleservices is actually a feature to send diagnostic results periodically to BMW dealer and schedule a service appointment.

It seems to me that Assist, Online, Teleservices and Tracking all need a carrier's SIM card to communicate with the target service and send/receive the data.

Also, most of the average thieves use a signal jammer before attempting to steal the car, so all network-based tracking services are probably very useless (such as BMW Tracking).

Anyway, would it be just possible to put a regular carrier's SIM into the slot somewhere and skip the BMW contract? Would that work?

 

No you cant use you own sim because the TCU has no where to put a sim in. I believe the data a sim provides is already built into the unit.

 

Just found this:

http://www.xbimmers.com/forums/showp...7&postcount=35

So it's true that it's difficult to access and it's hidden in the TCU. There's a standard SIM slot in the TCU just like in a normal cellphone.

The problem is that APN is not changeable and so only very few predefined SIM cards work (possibly carriers which cooperate with BMW). :thumbsdown:

 

Thats interesting. Good find.