Telescopic/Tilt Wheel Abnormality

[I_Miss_My_///M]

I purchased my '08 X5 in November 2018, and up until 2 days ago the column/wheel did NOT retract when exiting the vehicle, though both the tilt & telescope functions worked perfectly fine when using the lever to adjust. But Wednesday morning when I pulled the key fob from the dash and opened my door it motored "out of the way", and has continued to do so every time since.

Prior to that morning nothing out of the ordinary happened or was done (i.e. no service visit, battery wasn't unhooked, no software updates done, no coding done, etc.), and from all that I've read the only way to disable this function is by coding it out. Does anybody have any idea why this would have just started working out of the blue??