nuisance warnings of Electric Range Insufficient

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ChrisC

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 5, 2013
Messages
99
Location
Atlanta Georgia USA
From Day 1 with my i3, I was getting an alert of "Electric range insufficient" VERY frequently, sometimes as often as every few minutes. It did it when I had plenty of range (e.g. fully charged in morning), and did it even when I did not have a destination programmed in the navigation.

I understand seeing this if my programmed destination was beyond the range, but I would see this even if NO DESTINATION WAS PROGRAMMED. And I'd see it VERY frequently, like every few minutes. It was supremely annoying, and an embarrassing distraction when doing show-and-tell of the car. Yes, let's remind people of the limited range of the car every few minutes, shall we?

I figured it was just a stupid bug that BMW would fix in January. But in a moment of idleness a couple days ago, I took a picture of it, did some googling (nothing found) and then finally posted a question about it on the BMW i3 Facebook group.

Within 8 minutes I had the answer! (thanks Kristine K.) In short, you can mark a charging location as "favorite" or "preferred", and the car will warn you if you are out of range of that location. My i3 had a location hundreds of miles away marked as a favorite! The car had originally been at an out-of-state dealer (where they apparently applied this setting) and was then trucked to me when my local dealer found it in the BMW system. So it was in constant peril, worried about me being 300 miles from the preferred charging location.

They really need to improve that error message to say that I'm too far from the preferred location. That would have prompted me to look for where this "preferred location" was set ...

(I have a picture, but can't upload here, and am not going to bother uploading it someplace else and link to it.)

To fix it, do the following in the car:
- Main Menu
- Navigation
- Map
- move controller to left to access the left side menu
- Guidance
- Range to charging station
- Preferred charging station
- uncheck

You can also delete the preferred station here.

The FB group is great for quick answers and discussion, but not so good for reference, or search, and can't be seen by Google. So, the purpose of this thread in this public forum is to document it, so that when someone else Googles that warning text, they find this post :)
 
I would like to add my thanks. I have been tying to remove this annoyance for 8 months and had just about given up. I had taken the problem to my local main BMW dealer but they failed to know how to do anything about it, which did'nt impress me much! I always suspected it was linked to the previous owners setting but it's great to have at last removed it. Again, many thanks.
 
This post was a terrific find for me as well. I bought a used i3 a couple of weeks ago and this message baffled me and the local dealer, to whom I've sent a link to this post. What I wonder is, why don't BMW have software that clears all personal and custom data and preferences like this from all iDrives so the dealers can use it to prepare used vehicles for resale?
 
I'm pretty sure that there is a menu option in the iDrive to wipe out all user settings and start from scratch, and it even has a big scary warning box that says it will take 10 minutes to complete and you should not turn off your car while it runs. It was the first thing that I did when I picked up my new-to-me i3, to whack all of the previous owner's phone pairings and stuff.....
 
jadnashuanh said:
That info MIGHT be part of the profile stored in the key fob...there are ways to clear that information, too, I think.

Firstly thanks to the OP for tagging the. Subject in such a helpful way and for providing the info concisely.
Secondly I agree with jadnashuah that the info is in the key because it only happened today when I used the spare key for the firsts time that way the MAIN key for the previous owner so yes CHANGING KEYS MAY BRING UP THIS FAULT
 
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