[DavidI]

Hi All,

Thought I would post this after a couple hours inconvenience last night that could have been easily avoided.

After ignoring messages for a few days I finally remembered to go out to the car when parked at the office yesterday to kick off the update. I locked the car and forgot all about it, then got a message on my phone from the MyBMW app that the update had completed successfully.

A few hours later I got in the car to go home, and the car wouldn't start. Everything up to the point of holding in the Start button seemed normal - I got the welcome message when I opened the door, the seat adjusted when I clicked the seat belt in, but instead of the engine firing, the control display of its own accord flicked to vehicle diagnostics, then said 'Goodbye' then asked if I wanted to start the ventilation, which it always does when I turn the car off. While I had the starter pressed and the control display was flicking through its screens the '0' on the digital speedo was also blinking on and off rapidly.

I have a StarLine Canbus immobiliser fitted, which allows you to start the engine but will stall if you try to go into gear without pressing a sequence of buttons on the steering wheel. Press the sequence, you hear a confirmation tone, and can put the car in gear and drive off. But I wasn't even getting that far - I couldn't even start the engine.

I left the car for 10 minutes, tried again, but same results. Called BMW assistance who arranged to send help but it was going to take at least 90 minutes to get to me. I went back into the office, tried to google the same problem but came up with very little. I tried again after an hour or so, but behaviour was the same. The brake pedal had also gone rock hard but I suspect that was just from being pressed repeatedly in my efforts to start the engine.

After a couple of hours I got a message from BMW that a recovery truck was on its way. I called them to confirm this was a third-party truck so there was unlikely to be any attempt at repair onsite and they confirmed that was the case - they would tow the car to my dealer, who was about 10 minutes away. The searches that did relate to problems starting after software updates suggested the fix was to reinstall the software, although those searches both mentioned the software update had failed, while mine had allegedly succeeded.

I was resigned to the car ending up at the dealer now so thought I had better disable the immobiliser otherwise there was going to be a complicated conversation the next morning. I put the car into diagnostic mode (pressing the start button 3 times, quickly) then put in my code, got the tone, then put in the button sequence to turn the immobiliser off. I pressed the start button to turn everything off - and the engine started.

Since then, a couple of journeys later, the car has behaved 100% normally. I'm speculating, but I'd guess that the last part of the remote software update is the software telling the car to go into 'drive' mode but without the engine actually firing, and my car couldn't do that because of the immobiliser. Once I'd put the code in, the update could complete normally and everything was back to normal.

Apologies for the long post, but I hope that might be of use to someone. Next time I have a remote update to do I shall disable the immobiliser first, and if you have done an update and the car won't start try to get to a point where you can put in the immobiliser code/sequence and see if that helps.

All the best
David