More Electrical Gremlins

[Patrick-Irish]

On my 2001 X5 4.4 .....

Last night I'm sitting in the the house when through the window I see the turn signals flash once and this beeping noise started. Sounded like a truck backing up. It was coming from the X5, I had never heard it before. It was very windy, I thought it might be the alarm going off. Didn't sound like an alarm though (don't know what the alarm sounds like to be honest, it's never gone off) and the turn signals had only flashed once. Anyway unlocking the car with the fob stopped the bleeping, I locked it again and that was the end of that.

This morning strange things started to happen. The monitor display on the radio periodically goes blank and seems to restart itself. The radio goes silent for a split second when that happens and comes back on again. This happens every 30 seconds or so .... but the interval doesn't seem to be constant.

Also the turn signal is behaving strangely. When I indicate left or right, it ticks and flashes away happily, but every maybe 10 flashes it seems to skip a beat and then back to normal. Sometimes when I cancel the turn signal it continues flashing for a second or two and then stops.

When I got back in the car after dropping my daughter off on the way to work, the monitor was doing the same thing but now the radio wasn't working. I deliberately switched off the monitor, but 5 minutes later it came back to life all by itself. I tried turning the radio on and hey presto - it worked.

I'm fairly long in the tooth when it comes to BMW electrical problems. Never seen strange behaviour like this before though.

Anyone seen this before ? Anyone have the foggiest what the hell is going on ??!