I’ve been test driving the electric BMW iX for the holiday period, over December and January. I was given the xDrive 40 variant, however, I did go to Germany in October 2021 to drive the xDrive 50 at the EU launch. You can read my write-up about that here.

During my time with the iX, I tested all the tech I could. I enrolled my iPhone 13 Pro and Apple Watch Series 6 as car keys using Digital Key Plus. I also paired the My BMW app to the car so I could access certain functions remotely. This includes locking/unlocking the car, turning the climate control on, switching the lights on or use the hooter.

It also allowed me to access the real-time info about the battery status, range and other info like when I charge the vehicle. I usually get push notifications when the charge has begun, an update if there is an error and then another update when the charge is complete.

Sometime after December and into January, the car stopped alerting me about the charge info, range and battery status. I’m not sure if it was because going into 2022 caused it through a bug, but I also didn’t get a log my charge history and I charged the car many times up until 13 Jan when I managed to fix this issue.

I tried everything, logged out of the app; removed the car under Bluetooth settings on the phone; deleted the app; etc and nothing worked. The iX also happens to be the first car running on iDrive 8, BMW’s latest operating system, so naturally a fix was difficult to find. Also because the car no longer has a physical power button that would see on vehicles running operating system 7.

The fix involves giving iDrive 8 a hard reset. Remember, this is the same as giving your iPhone a hard reset, it clears the cache and fixes bugs, it does not delete any data. 

As you may know, when turn the car on without putting your foot on the brake, you can still access the infotainment system. I tried to give it a hard reset this way with the volume key and found that nothing happened.

A quick shout out to BMW Midrand’s Stefan who helped me. He used to be in the product department but is now in sales. He alerted BMW to the fact that there is no power button for a hard reset. Anyway, he suggested I switch the car on properly, i.e. foot on the brake, and then give it the hard reset. It worked.