Quote:
Originally Posted by Andyro
Ran into a colleague of mine this morning. He mentioned that a class action suit was filed against BMW recently, regarding software upgrades being performed at dealerships without the knowledge of vehicle owners. He didn't have many details beyond that, except to say it had to do with Turbo engines. Anyone hear anything about this?  Tried searching the forum but couldn't find any recent posts.
Found it!
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/12/ca_bmw.html
Has anyone experienced this that could explain further? Thinking (more like dreaming!) of upgrading to X5M, but wonder what issues folks are encountering with the new engine. Thanks. |
Wrong forum? This is the M forum, these specific updates did not concern the X5/X6 M.
Btw: this is a common/standard procedure. In Germany, we call it Werkstatt or Service Aktion. Most of the time, customers aren't informed because they usually don't feel the changes. In the above case, I think something went terribly wrong but I doubt that a class action could do something about it. BMW could always argue that they did what they did for safety reasons, as weird as this may sound. I'm no lawyer and I know everything is possible in the US when lawyers and class action suits are involved but I doubt that this is class action material. As far as I know, ALL car manufacturers update the ECU software from time to time when necessary and they don't always tell the customer. Dealers usually update the software whenever the car is in the repair shop and it is up to the dealer to tell customers about the update. Usually, they don't tell customers.
It is even worse with Mercedes Benz: whenever a Mercedes is brought to the dealership over here in Germany, the ECU of the car is "looking" for an update at Mercedes central. If it "finds" an update, the update is automatically downloaded and installed. This method also allows Mercedes to verify if the ECU software has been modded (chip tuning) or if there are some current or maybe future problems. Pretty cool.
Welcome to the 21st century.
