Long story short.

Left the radio on in the car while I went to get and then fit a roofbox (1/2 hour max). Came to start it again, but to no avail.

Called RAC who started it with jump leads and tested the battery which seemed OK.

Anyway, had the car serviced by an independent and when I went to pick it up it was already running. Thought nothing of it, but parked it at the train station while I was at work. Came back to find it dead again.

Doors would open, lights would flash etc, but not enough juice to turn the engine over.

Jumped it again.

Parked it overnight at the house and found that not only was there not enough juice to turn the car over, nothing came on when I put the key in.

Nothing at all.

Anyway, just tried jumping it from our Mini. As soon as I touched the negative cable to the grounding point there were lots of sparks and the alarm started going off detached cable and ran round to put key in ignition to turn it off. And the key wouldn't do anything to switch it off.

Finally thought I've nothing to lose and ignored initial sparking and connected cables with the intent to now actually start the BM.

At which point the Bimmer got just enough juice to lock the doors.

With my key in the ignition.

And my house keys on it.

At least the house is unlocked so I can go in and out. But my wife is out so I can't unlock the Beemer to get my keys out and now have to stay awake until she gets in as I can't lock the front door.

Brilliant.

 

Well we had a new battery installed on Friday and the car died again over the weekend.

Again, completely devoid of life. The doors had to be opened manually and when the key was put in the ignitionn not a single bulb on the dashboard came on.

I 'think' there has to be a short somewhere. My worry is that it's only started after it was serviced.

 

It's highly likely that there is something in the car that is slowly draining the battery. Is there a phone charger or anything you added to the car for stereo or something lately?

 

+1000 Or perhaps a faulty module that isn't "going to sleep" after the car is powered off? It does happen that if something stays on when it shouldn't you end up with a dead battery.

 

broken IBS (intelligent battery sensor) and broken Comfort access door handles seem to be a culprit pretty frequently. in my case, the comfort access was broken on the passenger side, preventing the car from going to sleep and draining the battery. I just disconnected it.

 

How do you narrow down the culprit though? Were there codes in your case?

 

Well the car's back with the garage at the moment. They've said that there are several modules spitting out fault codes. But they're not experts in diagnostics, so they send those codes to a third party to be assessed.

So currently, I'm waiting to see what it is - and how much it's going to cost me.

We don't have fully adjustable electric seats, but they do go up and down with electrics. I did notice that there sounded like a whirring and clicking coming from under the driver's seat - almost as if that motor was trying to activate.

 

Well, I picked it up again on Saturday and (fingers crossed) it seems to be OK.

Apparently, when the battery is changed, you have to tell the car it's been changed or it thinks that it's still using the old battery with no power.

When it was changed over, this wasn't done. But now it's been done and, so far, it's been OK.

Though they did say that it's going to be a bit of trial and error, and there was a fault code for the IBS, but they didn't want to start replacing stuff until this was tried.

They haven't charged for any of the investigative work, which I think is fair - given that it *may* be caused by something they forgot to do. Oh, and they came up to the house to pick the car up too.

I know BMW would have told us that they couldn't fit us in for three weeks and that's only if we didn't want a courtesy car - six weeks if we did - and then probably replaced everything they could think of, charged us the handsomely for the privilege and we'd still have a flat battery.