The car's computer said I needed brakes, but after inspection it didn't. The dealer said they had to reprogram the car to stop the message from showing up all the time. Not a biggie so I had it done. It took all day! It failed several times and eventually killed the radio and they would have to order another. They kept the car over the weekend (with loaner) and then on Monday they said they did something and the radio was working and everything was fine. Was I dooped? How does reprogramming take all day. They said the reprogramming would include all the most recent updates. For the life of me, I can't tell the difference except the computer doesn't say I need brakes!

 

Not quite sure what *exactly* went on in your case.

But often, there's the software, then updates to it, and then more, having to be applied in a particular order and with confirmation steps in between.

Miss one, or get a step wrong, it can take awhile. Or, the tech did all the steps right, but it did NOT work as planned, so "corporate" had to be called to troubleshoot the issue and send a revised software update.

I'm familiar with this a bit from the delivery of my 2012 MCS. I had the JCW tuning kit installed at delivery, and it delayed it a few days. The processes I described above were what was described to me at the time. The software they had didn't work for a 2012, so then "corporate" had to send new software that was then reinstalled, a couple of times, till it worked "right".

If you've ever upgraded your PC operating system, you have some idea of what might go wrong during many steps involved.

Or: they actually barked up the wrong tree, doing computer work when it was the sensor itself that was flaky/in error.

Anyhow: some idea of what might have happened...maybe.

 

The dealer-level software from BMW does not allow individual ECUs to be upgraded. Once you select to upgrade, you need to do all modules. These computers are very slow embedded systems, communicating on serial-port like interfaces (ancient by PC standards) so upgrading them is a pain... It may take 15min to flash something less than a MB. The radio module is usually tens of Megabytes in size and takes several hours.

So it is not uncommon for failures to occur during updates and the situation when these happen is more like having a faulty BIOS (i.e. it may not communicate at all, or communicate with special equipment only).

Anyway, i am not sure whether the update was needed for the brake sensors, but it used to be that if the sensor went off, you needed a new sensor to reset the service counter on the Kombi, otherwise it would ignore the reset command. Maybe they changed that in the newer firmwares??

 

Had the exact same thing happend to me,when I went in for my first oil change, sensor showing I need break pads but was false and they had to do a soft ware update, and for some reason it fried the radio, luckily they had another radio in stock. Good thing was sirus was free for another year,had to reactivate sirus .