BMW, I’m so scattered with you

I want to be clear from the beginning. I was never an enthusiasm of cars. My driving history includes a hand-me-down Volvo with a hole in the floors and a series of aggressive practical vehicles, including a VW golf and a SUV Mazda in which I put my family for 12 years. Then I hire a BMW i4 electric car.

What dragged me to i4? Unlike other electric vehicles, BMWs do not resemble any of the jetsons. I like that they are undervalued cars that happen to be electric. I liked that they are much less common than other UN in northern California. In addition, the i4 comes in something like twelve colors, including “Brooklyn Gray”, which – I know I hear ridiculous – thanked me in ways that Tesla’s hand choices could never. I had read online that the first adopters had software problems, but with visions of my elegant new BMW dancing on my head, I conveniently put this information away. These first instructions also felt exciting. The car was beautiful, the ride was smooth and I felt like I was going.

Nearly two years later, I do something I never thought I would do: eagerly awaiting the end of a lease in a luxury car, because its software is such a disaster that it makes my rusty Volvo look like a Paragon credibility.

A love story left

Let me count the ways in which this relationship has gone wrong, starting with the most basic mode: getting into my own car. In many cases, I have found in parking spaces, unable to unlock its doors with my phone, despite the BMW digital key designed specifically for this purpose. This sounds trivial until you weigh the grocery stores you look like trying to steal your own vehicle.

Digital basic issues have become so widespread that BMW owners sometimes have communal multi -stage solutions They read as instructions for disarming a bomb: “1 Open the BMW app on your phone and use it to unlock door 2, log in to the BMW ID on IDrive.

The user profile system is another exercise in futility. I cannot create visitors profile without relegating to the bottom of the users hierarchy. This means that in practice is that if someone else drives my car – even once – the vehicle will pull their phone and the playlist when they are in a series of bluetooth. BMW has overly shaped their profile system to the point where it requires explicit connection steps that should really happen automatically.

Completion of the car’s car ranges from poor to actively dangerous. The software usually updates Carplay functionality, requiring complete rebooting of the IDrive entertainment system. The issue of the reverse camera is particularly annoying. Put the car in reverse while using carplay navigation and when you shift back to the drive, you fly to the home screen instead of returning to your instructions.

The backup camera itself is practically useless in low light conditions and the display often becomes hot in touch.

Then there is the Lighting. If I do not remember locking the car by hand after passing away from it, I will occasionally notice that the outer lights are still burning on my way. I thought it could be a human mistake the first time it happened. Until the third time, I realized that it was a “feature” where the i4 enters a “pseudo-in-law” function that holds the lights and other systems that work indefinitely. Many owners report the same issue: Park the car, walk away, return later to find their vehicle to illuminate like a lighthouse and drain the battery.

Beyond the feeling on an almost daily basis that the car has amnesia, there are legal safety concerns. In 2022 I4 it was submitted to six recalls in the first year, including such a serious BMW that the owners told the owners that their cars were risks of fire when they were parked and informed them to “stop driving this vehicle immediately”. Since, Other revocations They have included battery control units that can cause sudden loss of power.

BMW is releasing software updates on i4 about every few months, but the process is full of problems. Updates are used to violating the connected services, causing owners to lose access to traffic information, weather data, remote parking functions and even the connectivity of the MyBMW application.

The Over-the-Air information system itself is unreliable, with owners reporting updates that have been stuck at various percentages for days, forcing trips to delegates for manual installation.

What is particularly misrepresented is that BMW places these vehicles as premium products. If you buy despite the lease, the i4 starts at over $ 50,000, with well -equipped models pushing $ 70,000 or more. Meanwhile, owners less expensive vehicles, including Hyundais and Lexus models, report bulk connectivity and uninterrupted user experiences.

I’m not saying that the company rushed these cars on the market without adequately testing their digital ecosystem, then they decided to treat their customers as beta testers without taking into account their well -being, but I’m also not I’m not saying that.

I really wanted this relationship to work. The i4 is beautiful, leads beautifully and represents everything I thought I wanted in an electric vehicle. But I can’t continue a relationship where the most basic functions – unlocking the doors that connect my phone, taking instructions – require the patience of a saint. (I don’t have the patience of a saint.)

Even my husband, who is usually the first to propose user error, recently emerged from the car after a particularly disappointing software collapse and announced that he would “have to meditate for a while”.

Car ownership should not be a stable source of deterioration. I should not maintain a mental database for solutions for features that need to work. I should not be afraid of software updates because they could break something that was (mostly) functional.

So bmw, I have it. You made a beautiful car, then sabotaged it with software so horrible that it is almost comical. I thought we would be driving to sunset together. Instead, I drive my i4 back to the dealership as soon as my lease is over. I’m surprised to say I can’t wait.