[Fabio]

Same for me. No issue since the update.

 

[Fabio]

I didn’t experience the issue since installing .53, but I reserve my judgement to this winter as the issue was potentially related to weather conditions and where I live the weather is gorgeous during summer.

Due to the lack of a mention in the release logs. It is possible that the issue was not completely addressed but mitigated to make it happen less often.

 

[Fabio]

I am on 3/2053.53 and have been for a week. It messed up 2 days ago on the way home from the gym and again today twice.

The fix is not mentioned in the release notes.

People hope at every update that this glaring issue is fixed, but they are just hoping. This update seemed aligned with 2 tweets of BMW NA so there was more hope than usual. However, BMW proper never acknowledged it. If no release notes or other official communication mention a software improvement, I don’t think one should expect it. It is not our job to beta test updates or divine what is in them.

I’m starting to accept that BMW either doesn’t care or is not capable of fixing the issue.

 

[Fabio]

GPS has been around for 30 years, so if apple can't get that straightened away, not sure how they can be relied on anything else.

Agreed. GPS not working in a product is trust busting.

However, in this case it is BMW having issues with the GPS position. And what is even more concerning is that the issue was reported almost a year ago. BMW hasn’t been able to come up with a fix in almost a year.

What I don’t agree with is saying that we cannot rely on anything else. Even if a car can cause an accident and kill people while a phone can’t. The car overall is amazing and works pretty well. I hope you will not sell your i4 due to this because you would be missing out.

 

[Fabio]

After 38 pages of this, I really don't see why anyone is still not using the native nav?

Many reasons.

The main one is Siri. I can ask Siri to start navigation to any POI or contact in my phone and in the vast majority of cases it just works. BMW’s voice recognition is very bad. I think it never worked even once for me. I don’t like to have to stop the car just for typing where I want to go. When I don’t want to risk navigation going crazy due to the “drift” (which is a sudden distraction as the maps start spinning as they constantly re-route and the car keeps suggesting me to steer in a wall), I ask Siri to start navigation to a POI and the use the share icon to hand it over to BMW Maps.

Also BMW maps seems to have decent data, but definitely doesn’t have all the information of Apple Maps (or Google Maps). Apple Maps has all the POIs, streets in my area of the world are accurate to the line markings (which is insane to me), and ETAs are precise to the minute. Also I suspect the traffic information is better.

Apple Maps have a better UI which is more readable and easy to understand at a glance. It even shows the streetlights so I can easily understand in what exact block of a city I have to turn. Even the animations are way smoother.

With CarPlay, I can use any other mobile app like Goggle Maps or Waze, if it works best for that route.

Ultimately, BMW Maps is just 4 or 5 years behind of mobile navigation apps. I bought the electrified version of the ultimate driving machine because I wanted the state of the art of driving comfort with that sweet electric torque. I want to experience the electric Renaissance of automotive tech. So I’m not happy to be stuck in the Middle Ages of navigation.

 

[Fabio]

Nowadays CarPlay is working way more reliably for me than in the past.

I wonder if it is related to the weather. I saw a bunch of reports of Seattle people being affected and I’m in the PNW. Lately the weather has been gettin better here andI wonder if that is related.
Btw this update is taking ages. I wonder if the Tesla Roadster will be released before the update 🤣

 

[Fabio]

Happened to me again yesterday. A reboot fixed it again. Seems like that is the only solution until they release an update that fixes it officially.

A iDrive reboot can help but in my experience not always does. Given that the issue is intermittent sometimes it might seem that an action fixes it, while it was only happenstance.

 

[Fabio]

"Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."

Taking choice out of the hands of consumers is a bad business strategy. Sure, do all this with your own software, but also provide interfaces for third party use. We know that a 3rd party ecosystem will come up with better and more innovative solutions to problems the 1st party didn't even know existed. If the market was big enough, they could do an app store, or course, but it's not (and can you imagine all the issues with a BMW app store?!?!).

Instead of seeing it as competitive, open the connections (APIs in tech parlance) and benefit from the brilliance of the devs and capabilities of the phone processing power.

Apple iOS ecosystem is tightly controlled (apps have significantly less privileges compared to Windows) and successful. Controlled vertical integration is something that can be pulled off by a company who is really good at making the platform. However, iDrive is nowhere close to that. BMW Maps are in the Middle Ages compared to Apple Maps and CarPlay. The UI and features are very limited and updates are basically not existent (they trickle every 3-4 months with very minor features). The community believes that even a minor update like 8.5, which just rearranged the UI a bit and mimics Tesla and CarPlay (the new upcoming version has the icons at the bottom) will not be released to Cars sold with 8. Tesla, and maybe Polestar and Rivian, can play this game. BMW and the other Germans carmakers haven’t shown the same capability with software so they likely will be better off integrating with Apple and Google so their infotainment stays competitive.

 

[Fabio]

Yeah... that's one thing I wish the iOS apps did... They show which lane to be in, but they don't show current lane or the animation...

I think BMW navigation uses data from the cameras to figure out in which lane you’re are. I have seen it being wrong in rare occasions. Cool feature though.

I think carmakers will try to integrate navigation with the specific hardware of the car (cameras, radars, lidars, integrated analysis systems that process sensor information) to reduce the competitive value of Android Auto and CarPlay in order to close their ecosystems.

 

[Fabio]

If the issue is hard to resolve, the fix could not address the actual problem but just mitigate/mask it.

Btw, it is crazy seeing all the people here who have to spend time and money for this. Everyone here has spent time trying to test software updates, to perform reboot sequences, plug cables, disable Wi-Fi, disconnect the Apple Watch, and even to change the phone.

All of this would not have been necessary if BMW would be more transparent about this issue.

So many anecdotal evidence here I myself thought latest update fixed it, but I do see them drifting less often. It happened to me once after getting 03/2023.27.

 

[Fabio]

Finally an official confirmation!

 

[Fabio]

Report of an accident where this issue distracted the driver:

New i4 got into an accident, airbag deployed. NEED HELP!

I have purchased i4 for 4 months. I was involved in a minor collision where I rear-ended another vehicle due to the carplay defects of GPS misalignment issue. Although there was no structural damage, the airbag deployed. The dealership is requesting that I replace the Safety pyrotechnics inside...

www.i4talk.com

 

[Fabio]

I recommend everyone with this issue to call BMW at 1855-269-3357 and open a case

How did you get this number and what should one expect if they call it?

 

[Fabio]

NHTSA Complaint #11511898

 

[Fabio]

Presumably Apple uses the car’s GPS data because they believe it is likely to be more accurate in some cases. So if the phone were to have a different (but fairly close) location, how would it know that this time it’s the car that is wrong?

In simple terms, it could check if the position is off more than X feets/meters respect to the internal GPS position or if it is erratic. The data from the car should be more accurate but if it is clearly wrong it should not be trusted.

 

[Fabio]

Maybe it is time to start a Reddit community similar to https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla. All of these folks disillusioned by the lack of basic manufacturing quality might jump ship thinking we don’t have so glaring issues. Somebody has to temper they expectations and inform them that basic software functionality, such as getting the correct GPS location found in Nokias from 20 years ago or manually pre-warming the battery, should not be taken for granted.

 

[Fabio]

BMW needs to address this glaring issue. But also Apple could alleviate it. CarPlay could notify the user that there is an error with the position provided by the car and that it is falling back to the sensor on the phone.

Sadly from this thread and the lack of communication from the BMW ecosystem, I have more hopes on Apple mitigating the issue than BMW fixing the problem. This would allow me to use CarPlay but with worse position quality and the problem would still be there for the other features (MyBMW app and who knows what else is impacted).

 

[Fabio]

This emergency GPS signal angle is interesting. The new iPhones have that crash detection feature, so it would be the phone software sending an SOS signal, which would, in this scenario, be the wrong location. They'd have this fixed real quick if someone can convince NHTSA to issue a recall because of this. They couldn't sell any idrive 8 cars until they do.

That is Apple problem though. The phone has an onboard GPS and should fallback to that if it gets incorrect data from other systems. I can understand the advantages of using the GPS position from the car for navigation (known orientation of the sensor compared to the direction of motion, better antenna) but I don’t think this should be done for other use cases.

 

[Fabio]

Do we know My BMW gets it from the car? I don't. It's entirely possible the app pulls it before disconnect from CarPlay, which may explain why sometimes it's at a previous location. I don't think we know.

It would awkward to the design the system in this way. This means that if somebody else drives your car the position will not be updated in your phone. Or that multiple drivers of the same car do not have up to date locations in their apps. To avoid this it is necessary for the car to upload the position to BMW servers. Also we know is not a technical challenge due to the connected services, the 5g connectivity, and the fact that GPS positions are very small data.

One could argue that as an optimization the car also passes the position to the app via Bluetooth. However, that would be a lot of additional complexity for basically no benefit. It would also mean the primary mechanism is not sufficient and that in some case the server doesn’t have the correctly position. That in turn implies that you cannot reliably use the server position, for example to try to track a stolen car.

So it is fair to say that the app gets its position from the server as 99% of app do.

 

[Fabio]

It will be correct for the SOS in the car and incorrect for anything on the iPhone.

We don’t know that. The position is incorrect in the My BMW which doesn’t use the GPS position from iOS but gets it directly from the car. So we know that other sub-systems of the car can have the GPS issue. We don’t know if the sub-system used for SOS gets the borked position or not, but from what we know it is possible that it is affected.