Electronic Parking Brake Failure

[Smartbear]

The diagnostic charge annoys me - They are supposed to be the experts and should have the experience/knowledge to determine a fault without plugging a bit of key into a port!

Without diagnostic tests they’d just be making an educated guess Ron, if most customers paid hundreds of pounds and it didn’t cure the issue because it was just based on a hunch most would be pretty hacked off i guess
Rob

I think there will be times when diagnostic tools are invaluable but they have generally seen faults / failures before.
I wonder how many times the charge for diagnostics when the fault is obvious to them ?

There’s a big difference between strongly suspecting something & being able to pinpoint it with a diagnostic machine, the dealership would lose any credibility if they didn’t use it & the customer wasted their money on what could be an expensive guessing game.
Rob

[ronk]

They’ll start charging for the use of their torque wrenches next!

[Smartbear]

They’ll start charging for the use of their torque wrenches next!

That’s already incorporated in the bill Ronk
Rob

[ronk]

They’ll start charging for the use of their torque wrenches next!

That’s already incorporated in the bill Ronk
Rob

And that’s my point !

[Smartbear]

They’ll start charging for the use of their torque wrenches next!

That’s already incorporated in the bill Ronk
Rob

And that’s my point !

If they hide the diagnostics fee in with the bill for fixing a problem it won’t make it cheaper, that’s just smoke & mirrors
Rob

[mr.tourette]

Is there a way of knowing if this has been done on a car or not, would like to know if this is something i can expect in the future

[Pbondar]

Having spent 4 years with this mobile set of computers I say from experience that many times the fault may appear obvious to the owner only on diagnosis to be either completely different cause and/or partially related..

The manufacture goes to extraordinary lengths to create car specific faults codes and you’re suggesting they ignore all that valuable data and do it in a hunch?

As someone who has had to support pilots (in theory well trained) who reported issues only to see after downloading history and daily codes that the root cause was nothing like what the pilot reported..

[Pbondar]

Is there a way of knowing if this has been done on a car or not, would like to know if this is something i can expect in the future

Yup the history log and revision level of the firmware and it’s update date shows that..

[bte123]

Hoping to get this sorted over the weekend, have the cable, software, daten files and everything prepped and ready apart from... the drivers for the cable are on a CD provided, only you guessed it, my laptop being a 14inch lenovo thinkpad does not have a cd drive... to save a drive into the office on a weekend i dont suppose anyone could chuck me a dropbox / google drive link to drivers they've gotten on a USB file if they see this.

thanks in advance. have googled without much luck but happy to be corrected.

EDIT: Found it, at least i think so = generic VCP drivers can be found here : https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

[Smartbear]

Is there a way of knowing if this has been done on a car or not, would like to know if this is something i can expect in the future

Yup the history log and revision level of the firmware and it’s update date shows that..

I wonder if there’s a production date where the amended software was loaded from new?
Have there been any lci cars fallen foul of this?
Rob

[flybobbie]

When i bought my 3 year old car, 2012, few months later it was called back for a security software update.
Never had any problem with ebrake, but my colleague gave up on her 12k mile 2011 car as her ebrake failure was the last straw.
I wonder if i go at some point go to BMW and ask them to read my key, would they give the software update code.

Seems bonkers to me that folks are paying for updates when it's BMW's faulty hardware or software.

[Ole gits rule]

Mine is 2011 and was fine on the test drive - when the garage went to do a PDI in Oct 20 it had failed so cars can go for an age without the e-brake failing.

Mine was caused by a dead battery which I did warn them about - went to BMW for software update so there must be a different firmware number.

[Kieran5492]

Edit

[BlackyBoy]

Hi - what a popular thread/issue.

I have an e89 23i and I am selling it. However it has a stuck bonnet that won’t open (least of my problems right now) and it’s been sat largely unused so the battery is dead. (Discharge warning / low level warning etc etc)

Having said that she actually started first time surprisingly 2 days ago but has yesterday died completely- I guess I just got lucky first time.

I’ve had non other than the wheeler dealers tv team interested in buying but unfortunately since the battery has died it won’t start and the dreaded handbrake failure message has appeared.

I’ve read the entire thread and all very useful and I’m going to attempt the software update myself (after charging the battery direct in the boot first) only thing that doesn’t seem clear is which cable to use. A few different ones mentioned/posted but not clear on which is best. Can someone share a cable that has worked recently with the 2017 patch data and e89? Just want to make sure I don’t waste 20/30 quid on wrong one.

Much appreciated.

[sakidev]

Thank god I found this thread, I just fixed a non working parking brake vía doing a software update to the 2017 daten files!

And yes, my parking brake also started failing due to a bad battery. I changed it before even trying all this.

Another E89 2009 Z4 fixed! Can't explain with words how grateful I am, what could have costed me 300 euros ended up costing 30 (due to having to buy the K DCAN cable).

Also, I freaked out for a moment cause the engine stopped halfway updating the EMF89 files and then an engine warning popped up, but that went away after pulling the keys off and on again.

God bless the YouTube guy for his instructions