Quote:
Originally Posted by regular guy
I'm more inclined to call it a misguided design decision, instead of a screw up. And of course I'm more willing to give a pass to the ECU programmers because I design similar closed-loop software for a living and I have more faith in what those guys are doing.
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I work in software too, and actually take the opposite perspective, that know how easy it is to overlook the "corner cases" as referred to earlier, it isn't a stretch for me to imagine some cases the programmers did not anticipate and account for. State of the art hardware makes it even more likely that something could have been programmed wrong for
certain rare combinations of environmental conditions, as there'd be less time to work out the kinks in the field. I like to think back to the original batman (with Michael Keaton), where the joker was poisoning people, but only if you used certain combinations of products. Hair spray was fine, but hair spray and deodorant killed you. Maybe 91 octane by itself is fine, but 91 octane with slightly over spec levels of ethanol causes issues.
Another item that has surprisingly never came up is what if any impact the later software revisions made. I really don't know what all got changed in 240e, but I certain notice some behaviors are changed, including warmup. Maybe BMW did discover some issues and fix them, but didn't think the failure level was high enough to warrant pushing 240e out for everyone. I only mention this because their seems to be somewhat of an attitude that if it's an ECU issue, why hasn't it been fixed, and my thought is it possibly has been, but they just didn't want to announce it to the world and issue a recall, because to-date the number of failures has been pretty low.