Guys, these are things about our E90 that you can't find in the manual book (of course certain features are not available for E90 in our country:
The reset button on the A/C when pressed after the car is off will use residual heat from the engine to keep the car warm. It really helps out in the winter when you have to make a 20-30 min stop inside a place.
Hidden trunk latch
Hold unlock button to open all widows + moonroof
Press the fold button (to fold) of your side mirrors before driving. At the speed of 25MPH it resets back to open position.
Like the E46's when the temperature drops below 37F you get a warning light about possible ice on the road.
After turning off the car flip the headlight stalk back and your headlights will stay lit for a few seconds after you lock the car.
Throw your keys into the trunk then close it, it will magically open again. Safety feature that makes it impossible to lock your keys in the trunk
Pushing your turn signal up or down after shutting off the car (and opening the door) will cause the front and rear blinkers on one side to stay illuminated. I use this when I park along a busy street and want to make sure people see my car parked on the side of the road. Pushing up on the stalk illuminates the right side, pushing down illuminates the left side.
I think it's cool that each key remembers the radio presets, seat and mirror positions, and climate control settings from the last time you used that key.
Ventilated cup holder in center console
Timed venting option. I can access the Climate menu in my iDrive and set the car to vent the air at certain times, say when I get off work, so the car will be cool. Dunno if this is available in non-iDrive cars
There is that volume/drive sensitive setting where the faster you go, the volume adjusts accordingly automatically, and also when you slow down it goes down to the starting volume it was set at. IIRC you can't even turn it off, you can only keep it at the lowest setting.
-With CA, car will only let you open the door you are closest to, so if you are at the drivers door, and someone places their hand in the passenger door, it wont open.
-Leaving your keys inside the car and trying to close the door with finger on door handle wont work, car is stopping you from being an idiot and locking yourself out.
-With CA, if you are trying to open the trunk, press the trunk button on the underside next to your license plate and then move your palm (immedietly after pressing) closer to the BMW emblem. This will cause it to open faster. Well, it does for me, thats my story and I'm sticking with it.
-Stupid North American people cannot be trusted to hold the lock button on the key fob to close windows/sunroof/mirror as can be done with CA by holding finger on lock position.
-The cruise control system actually applies your brakes and turns on brake lights if you are going downhill or lower your CC speed setting.
Instead of pushing right to go to "Navigation" each time, HOLD the controller to the right for approx. 2 seconds. It will go to your last nav screen (even if you've turned off the car in between). Same deal for "Entertainment" or "Phone." It saves you making the same old menu choices every time. EDIT - I should add, you can hit the voice command button and say "Map facing north" anytime, too. Personally, I prefer "Map, direction of travel.
CA fobs have a regular battery that you replace every so often.
First aid kit has everything but band-aids (at least mine never had any)
car can play MP3 cd's (i didnt know until a month or so ago)
E46 when you turn the ignition on to setting 1, whilst the obc is displaying miles remaining to next service, press the knob which you use to adjust the clock. This will then display the next due date for your brakes to be serviced.
The volume knob (Next to the CD slot) is also a mute button, at least for iDrive L7 system. Push it once and (on iDrive) a symbol of a speaker with a slash through it appears on the bottom of the display about a third of the way from the left. Push it again and the symbol is replaced with the sound.
If you have the lights set to auto and you want them on during the day, just tap the fog lights button.....all lights come on.
Pressumably the feature is supposed to assist in parking next to a curb. Most of the time the curb will be on the passenger side . . . so only that mirror will angle down to assist with parking.
IDRIVE hold the controller in any of the four directions to immediately jump to that section (specifically, to the last page you were at in that section)
If you use the actual key to lock the front driver door, hold the key rotated to right for a few seconds and all 4 windows (if open) will close. This might be handy if you had a bunch of passenger exit your car and forget to close the windows. For those of us with CA, we can do this without disassembling our key fob just by touching the "lock" ridges a second or two longer than normal. Besides the 4 windows, the sunroof also closes. For the 2006 models, the mirrors also fold in.
Another one... the volume knob (and on the steering wheel) will adjust the navigation speaking directions. Just dial the volume while directions are given. Same thing for the phone function (yeah, that one's a little more obvious)
here's another......lift the spare tire compartment cover up all the way to the roof of the trunk...it will click and lock in place to stay up
iDdrive only w/voice control. Some probably know this, and it is really more of a 'cool' feature than convenient. While in FM Radio or CD mode: (1) hit the voice button, and then (2) specify the radio station or CD track number. Example, "1" "0" "4" "." "3" and then 104.3 will come on. Also, while in CD, speak "track 14," then track 14 will come on. Comes in handy on big CD's, but now hardly use this since I mostly listen to Sirius. Try saying "CD Track 1" or "FM 104 point 3" or "FM Frequency 104 point 3" or whatever from any other iDrive screen. It works!
A tip to voice command users who get a lot of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you" responses: don't talk after the beep, talk after the little icon for voice entry appears in the lower left corner of the iDrive screen (about a second after the beep). I went from a 75% success ratio with the voice recognition to near 100% when I started doing that.
when you use cruise control when the headlights are on a little marker slides around the speedometer to the speed you have set...pretty nifty
When using the MP3 player you can skip ahead 10 songs at a time by pressing the M button (I think for Manual) followed by the regular skip buttons, instead of just one at a time.
To cancel the turn signal, you don't push it the opposite direction. You push it slightly (not beyond the resistance point) in the same direction as the blinking side.
I didn't know that the car will automatically disconnect the battery if you left your lights on. It will work when you start the car again and all you have to do is reset the time and date.
Of course you can add POI to the BMW nav with a bit of know how:
http://www.bmwnavaddpoi.co.uk/
All this time, I have been saying "Map, Direction of Travel" or "Map, Facing North" at the voice entry to get the map screen. It turns out all you have to say is "Map." The computer will turn on the map in the view you used last
Pull back for flash-to-pass, the halgons will come on (quicker flashing and harmless). Push foward: Shield in xenon headlights retracts allowing full output to be released foward (that's why the cutoff is there when the low beam are on and the shield is blocking it) If xenons were used in the high beams flash-to-pass, they would have a shorter lifespan due to flashing and a longer warmup meaning they would need a few cycles or a short time of staying on to get full output. I like the BMW's flash-to-pass feature, it works good and very easy to use on those idiots cruising in the left lane when the 2 right lanes are empty.
did you guys now about the overdrive feature , the is a button behind the pedal.
if you floor your at highways speeds and click the pedal once while being floor it will make the car change to the next lower gear. It is called a kick-down switch. What it does is at wide open throttle it will down shift to the lowest possible gear (without going over the redline) in order to achieve maximum acceleration.
Very cool I love it and I probably use it almost every day.
I learned today that if I hit the cruise control lever hard it steps in 5mph increments, which essentially solves my problem for "active" cruise control.
The mirror will only tip down in reverse if you have the switch to adjust the mirror on the left mirror. You probably never noticed it until recently because you had the switch to the right mirror...
This is probably common knowledge but when at high speeds (100+), the brakes tighten up significantly and have much more race-like stopping ability. This can actually be a lifesaver, because I was hitting 120+ one time and had to stop short. The brakes were PHENOMENAL in their ability to quickly and precisely stop the car. The same goes for the steering which is absolutely wonderful at high speeds. It will tighten up automatically.
With iDrive you can set speed limit warning using voice command. Just press the voice command button, say limit and it takes you to the limit setting screen. however voice command goes inactive at this point which typically means youcan't use any more voice commands on this screen. however you can press the voice command button again and speak out the speed limit like 60 mph etc.
The odometer read out normally switches off when you stop the engine and remove the key. If you want to check the current mileage you don't need to start the engine again - just push the little black button on the instrument cluster
Do you guys know about the slots to hold toll tickets and other papers in the sun visors? I like that feature.
there are 2 ways for using high beams, either pull the lever or push it...if you push it, it will give higher beams (more than if u pull it)
If you want MP3 information to be displayed in your head unit but don't get any data, convert the ID tags on your MP3s to V1.1 from V2.
They have a key fob receptor conected to the service computers. They pull all your owner info out of the fob as well as any error codes and general operational data from the onboard computer. Not sure how much they can pull from the fob. Nice time saver for the service guys.
Is that true?
