NHTSA Complaint #11511929 — 2023 BMW 330I

Several 2023 BMW models now feature a new infotainment system called iDrive 8. This new iDrive 8 contains a crucial bug that I believe affects the safety of the driver. This new infotainment system randomly loses the car’s exact GPS location, which makes the car think it’s somewhere else. The location marker just slowly drifts away from its real coordinates to nearby roads for example, without any warning or indication. The problem occurs randomly with no identifiable pattern. When connected to Apple Carplay, the iPhone uses the car’s location. If the problem (location drift) occurs while driving in the city, the driver might receive false directions from the navigation app due to the wrong GPS location, which might lead to wrong way turns into one-way streets. Furthermore, since the car thinks it is located somewhere different than its real location, in the event of an accident or whenever the SOS button is engaged, first responders will get a false location of the car. For example, the car might be on the highway but first responders will get a location indicating the car is in the middle of a nearby lake. Since iPhone uses a car-provided location, in the event of an accident the iPhone 14’s crash detection feature will also be sending first responders an incorrect location. To sum it up, the new infotainment system keeps randomly losing the car’s real location, which leads navigation apps to give the driver wrong directions when using Apple Carplay, which might lead to death if the driver gets instructed to do a wrong-way turn into a one-way street for example. In the event of a crash, the car will be sending wrong coordinates to first responders which might cause significant delays to their response and might lead to the death of the injured people. BMW acknowledged the problem, said there’s no fix at the moment and no timeline for a fix.