Jimbo

Whatever it's written in, the programmers did not test it enough.
Too many bugs costing us too much time. Time is money. So add about $5k to the cost of your vehicle for all the time that's wasted in service.

Just like Microsoft; release it and have the users debug it for you. And don't provide proactive fixes; just wait until it breaks causing the users a lot of headaches.

And, if the dealer/techs can't figure it out, it's "Normal" is the answer until the real fix comes along.

My next car won't be a BMW. Idiots.

firewired

As for the E60 I wonder how many of these software issues will continue... or if they just come from buying a first model year after a drastic overhaul like the 7. If I recall the 2002 7 series had a bunch of software issues requiring repeated reprogramming, and 2003 onward were much less troubled by those same problems. What do you all think?

Interesting thing was I initially looked at used 7s and decided eventually on the new 545. When I talked to several BMW salesmen from different dealerships they all were disparaging about the 2002 7 series saying it had too many software problems and would not be worth it. I figure that by now those software glitches have to all be worked out by now.

DaveR

Well, as the article suggests, they can write code without testing it. I guess this is what BMW folks actually told them

Here's the quote from the article:

"ANOTHER BIG THING? The TLA allows a car's computer guts to stay current even while the car ages. BMW can continually write updates and add-ons that work together without testing, thanks to the underlying Java"

The other tidbit if true, and BMW releases the APIs, would be totally cool:
"Partners that know how to program in Java could also write software to run on iDrive".
If you can have third party apps running on iDrive, that would be awesome, though probably not add to the reliability issues

Thanks,
Dave

Iceman

The keyboard?
Well there must be a place for a keyboard in our cars, since BMW offers BMW online...

mrbelk

The gist of the no testing thing is that a module developer shouldn't have to do any integration or regression testing of his module against the other modules that have been "attached" to the core system since those connections are made with core Java API calls that have already been tested and proven to work. Without looking at a ER or UML diagram of the system architecture, I would suspect that each module is run in its own little "sandbox" that is isolated from the other modules that are loaded when the iDrive system boots.

-MrB

Flowerfred

Why do I have the feeling this thread is leading to foglights?

JDN

I think this would be a good week end for running with the foggies on -- make sure everybody notices us. I'm not always sure they see me.