[J_P]

Some i4 owners have started to notice they have the option to manually pre-condition their battery prior to charging. An essential feature if you don't want to be tied to BMW's navigation program.

It now transpires that cars shipped prior to November 2022 may not get this feature. I am really annoyed that my six week old car may not get this as I really don't like the BMW navigation software and have stuck to using Waze but suffer slow charging rates as a consequence of there being no pre-conditioning of the battery before charging. If like me, you aren't happy about this, I suggest you complain to BMW before they make a final decision about this.

Below is my complaint to BMW that fully explains the issue and why this is important. I hope it will also give ideas for others who wish to complain. In the UK, complaints go to customer.service@bmw.co.uk

Dear Sir/Madam

I am writing to complain about the attached dealer notification.

I ordered my M50 in December 2021 and have now had the pleasure of driving it for about six weeks. During the long wait for the car, I have spent a lot of time online discussing the car, both with potential and actual owners of the car.

Recently there has been a lot of consternation about the possibility of the i4 not getting iDrive 8.5. There has been a lively debate about this, split mostly into two camps, those that aren’t particularly bothered by user interface changes, and those that expect to be constantly upgraded, a similar experience to the computers or mobile phones.

Personally, I’m of the former camp but the one thing that everybody agrees upon is the need for BMW to maintain functionality that addresses the driving experience.

One of the significant deficiencies of the i4 as originally shipped, is the inability to manually initiate battery pre-conditioning. For an EV, I remain surprised that nobody at BMW realised the significance of this feature from the outset. Currently, the only way to initiate battery pre-conditioning is via the BMW navigation software. For various reasons, many people do not like or want to use this application but continue to utilise their existing favourite navigation application via Android Auto or CarPlay but this results in significantly longer charge times as the battery is not in an optimum state when they arrive at a charging station.

Many people thought it was only a matter of time before BMW added this functionality and you can imagine the excitement when some people discovered they now have an option in the i4 charging section to initiate battery pre-conditioning. There was a lot of discussion about why only some people were seeing this option when others (even on the latest 2022/11.44 software) weren’t. Even before the attached dealer notification became public knowledge, it was being suggested that to have this option, the cars had to have been manufactured in 2022/11 or later.

There are many attractive benefits of driving an EV but everyone is aware that the key downside is range anxiety and the time it takes to recharge – no more three minute fill ups at the pump to get another four hundred miles of range. You can therefore imagine owners’ frustration and annoyance to find out that their brand new cars may be denied the ability to significantly improve their recharging time. I have a £75,000 car that I have owned for six weeks and BMW are telling me that it may already remain feature deficient for the rest of its lifetime.

As I said at the beginning of this complaint. I’m not that bothered about user interface updates but I expect BMW to fully support and update the cars key functionality throughout the lifetime of the car. Six weeks into ownership and you have potentially failed that expectation. Software is now a key component of modern cars, one that you do not appear to take seriously. As an early adopter, you get a lot of interest from non-EV owners and whilst I love the car, I now have to add the caveat that I’m not sure I would buy BMW because they don’t seem committed to maintaining the software functionality that is now key to any modern car.

With regards to this particular issue, I also find it extremely hard to understand why it may not be possible to bring this feature to pre-2022/11 cars. I am not a programmer but I have supported IT systems and networks at a high level for the last thirty-five years. Clearly something in the car changed that month (although in BMW’s typically opaque communications, nobody knows what that was) but all i4s already have the ability to pre-condition the battery via the BMW navigation software. If the navigation program can do this via its software, it is impossible to understand why your software team can’t make the same facility work via an alternative software interface, i.e., a manual battery pre-conditioning tile.

You may feel this complaint is premature. The dealer notification has not completely ruled out this coming to all i4s:

“For vehicles produced before this the functionality is not available. We can also not for the time being confirm that this will be added through a future software update, as the technical prerequisites are still being investigated”

But I am complaining now because it is more effective making your feelings known before a final decision has been made, than after it.

As I have already explained, users find it unfathomable why this feature can’t be added to older cars when battery pre-conditioning is already software controlled through the BMW navigation program. But even if your software engineers decide it is not possible to bring this essential feature to ‘older cars’, ‘older’ including my six week old car, I hope that BMW will at least offer the possibility of a hardware upgrade to enable us to gain this essential feature. I also think BMW should explain what changed in November 2022 and why this makes it impossible to implement a software upgrade to bring this feature to ‘older’ cars.

Maybe time for a new slogan – “Ultimate Driving Machine, once you’ve waited for it to charge”

Yours faithfully

[Space Cadet]

This happens all the time. Two months after I bought my X6, BMW added RTTI to the iDrive but it could not be added to cars made before that date, even in the same model year. We’re going to see the same thing with iDrive 8 to 8.5, even though it’s still Linux based and looks to be software related only - no new hardware.
It’s not just BMW that do this either.

[mlanes01]

I would love an easy precondition feature that would be an easy shortcut in the Idrive but for now I just navigate with Google maps and try to remember when I'm 25 mins away to switch to the native gps and select the charger destination couple extra steps but same idea for now

[heatmizr]

mlanes01 how old is your car?
Is it something that may be added via an update? Are others seeing this function now?

I just ran across the below Bjorn video from JULY 2022 and he has a button to "Begin Pre-conditioning"... It's a press car so maybe had a beta of something that is rolling out / has rolled out since?

I linked to the point of the video where he points it out:

[kbsilver]

I believe that was CABIN preconditioning. This is separate from battery preconditioning. Having the same name does become confusing.

[heatmizr]

Of course... My bad.