For whatever it's worth, I believe this might help someone out there. After taking delivery of my 540i and as a normal warm-blooded, happy, inquisitive and adventurous individual (just like my 540i ;-)), I decided to play around with the widescreen nav with a view to customising the display to my liking.
While browsing, I found the menu "code" which I quickly selected so that I could put my own pin number (same as my ATM pin..hahaha). I remember thinking what if I mess the thing up but as me being me, I went on, punched in the 4 digit code (it's not 1234 or 0000 or 9999 as many of us would choose) and then selected "Activate". Simple, right? Wrong!
The effect was that when I proceeded to start the car, it requested me to enter the 4 digit code which I did with a sense of achievement. To my surprise, the car didn't take it. That's when it suddenly dawned on me that I was in deep $h!t. Called all known bmw owner friends but no one could come up with a definite solution. Then decided to call BMW-On-Call where they confirmed they are only involved in dealing with other issues except my code issue and quickly directing me to agents around.
Meanwhile, I was all the while, trying all suggestions from friends at thesame time and one of them was to disconnect the battery for 15 minutes and reconnect again. This suggestion was what did the trick. Once I reconnected, the nav displayed a message that the code will be deactivated in 10 minutes where after, it started counting down second by second.
Those 10 minutes felt like a whole day to me as I was waiting with my fingers crossed. By the way, the message displayed was "Emerg. Deact" - Short for Emergency Deactivation.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, after the count-down, the car reset itself and was back in it's original state. "Phew!", I said as I was driving back home like James Bond trying to escape that torpedo from the movie "The Spy Who Loved Me".
You can respond with lessons to be learnt.
While browsing, I found the menu "code" which I quickly selected so that I could put my own pin number (same as my ATM pin..hahaha). I remember thinking what if I mess the thing up but as me being me, I went on, punched in the 4 digit code (it's not 1234 or 0000 or 9999 as many of us would choose) and then selected "Activate". Simple, right? Wrong!
The effect was that when I proceeded to start the car, it requested me to enter the 4 digit code which I did with a sense of achievement. To my surprise, the car didn't take it. That's when it suddenly dawned on me that I was in deep $h!t. Called all known bmw owner friends but no one could come up with a definite solution. Then decided to call BMW-On-Call where they confirmed they are only involved in dealing with other issues except my code issue and quickly directing me to agents around.
Meanwhile, I was all the while, trying all suggestions from friends at thesame time and one of them was to disconnect the battery for 15 minutes and reconnect again. This suggestion was what did the trick. Once I reconnected, the nav displayed a message that the code will be deactivated in 10 minutes where after, it started counting down second by second.
Those 10 minutes felt like a whole day to me as I was waiting with my fingers crossed. By the way, the message displayed was "Emerg. Deact" - Short for Emergency Deactivation.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, after the count-down, the car reset itself and was back in it's original state. "Phew!", I said as I was driving back home like James Bond trying to escape that torpedo from the movie "The Spy Who Loved Me".
You can respond with lessons to be learnt.
