4G TCU retrofit update (it's positive)

[tezarc]

If you are unfamiliar with my saga, in response to the 3G sunset notice I tasked my local dealership to acquire and retrofit a 4G TCU into my 2014 i3. To read the details of that adventure please see my original post:
https://www.mybmwi3.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17401

To summarize everything worked seamlessly until the cutoff in February when I found out BMW would not let me renew ConnectedDrive services past the sunset even though they could verify I had a 4G TCU.
I walked away from the matter keeping the ability to perform remote operations like scheduling departures, preconditioning until 2024 and immediately losing real time traffic and BMW online after the sunset.

Fast forward to now. After getting system errors when trying schedule departures in the app a few days ago I logged in to the ConnectedDrive website to find a new item in the store:

I purchased the package out of curiosity, knowing I have 30 days to get a full refund should nothing happen. Well hours later real time traffic and BMW online is back!

So it eventually worked out after all those roadblocks.

 

[eNate]

Wow, I didn't expect that! Congrats. So, it's just the matter of a owner locating the 4G box and having it officially installed and registered by a BMW service department?

 

[tezarc]

Correct. Basically all the dealership costs is because you need legitimate ISTA+ access to update the VIN to IMEI in the ConnectedDrive database.
I would surmise if you obtain a new, unused 4G TCU yourself then ask the dealership to do the work they may do it and you'd save $300, but I wasn't going to chance it.

 

[frictioncircle]

tezarc –

Thank you for sharing this latest bit of news.

I very much enjoyed reading about your 4G upgrade in the original thread: https://www.mybmwi3.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17401

My 2014 BEV is greatly missed, so it's a true delight seeing that you're able to now access (on your 2014) live news regarding Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster!

 

[frictioncircle]

Just adding on that I wasn't joking, tezarc, I love that you're now able to get online services again.

It also is nice to see the original i3's UI, and how distinctive it was compared to the rest of BMW's iDrive designs.

 

[3pete]

Thanks for going through this and sharing your updates! It's nice to know BMW is lying about there not being an upgrade path, but also it's a little reassuring that their tech isn't as horribly designed as the customer service claims when they say it's impossible to upgrade a modem.

As a fellow 2014 owner, have you at all broached the topic with BMW that your car was sold with 10 years of Connected Drive included, so you shouldn't even need to pay the subscription fee until 2024? :lol:

 

[airman2482]

Glad you got it solved!

Fortunately for me, my old TCU failed while under BMW warranty and the dealer replaced it with a new 4G LTE box. My connected drive works fine.

Again, glad to see it was solved for you!

 

[partialteen]

So great. Congratulation! I didn't even find a way to solve it thinking it was impossible.
krunker

 

[Tezza]

If you are unfamiliar with my saga, in response to the 3G sunset notice I tasked my local dealership to acquire and retrofit a 4G TCU into my 2014 i3. To read the details of that adventure please see my original post:
https://www.mybmwi3.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17401

To summarize everything worked seamlessly until the cutoff in February when I found out BMW would not let me renew ConnectedDrive services past the sunset even though they could verify I had a 4G TCU.
I walked away from the matter keeping the ability to perform remote operations like scheduling departures, preconditioning until 2024 and immediately losing real time traffic and BMW online after the sunset.

Fast forward to now. After getting system errors when trying schedule departures in the app a few days ago I logged in to the ConnectedDrive website to find a new item in the store:

I purchased the package out of curiosity, knowing I have 30 days to get a full refund should nothing happen. Well hours later real time traffic and BMW online is back!

So it eventually worked out after all those roadblocks.

So came out of retirement and went to work again and have been busy. However I have followed through, after purchasing the 4g TCB for my i3 I had to lean on the local dealer hard to fit it (extremely negative Google review) so they relented and fit my BMW original 4g TCB as fitted to the 2018 i3 which threw an error on the dash as it was not the original 2016 part. This opened to me a whole series of questions regarding legality of blocking the fitment of any other electrical component in the car, non BMW aircon compressor, main battery or literally anything electrical. The first step of installation BMW ista looks for only the original BMW part and blocks the rest of the coding if it does not see it, that's a monopoly and allows price gouging. There are plenty of cheaper components available for the i3, the aircon compressor $4000 in Australia $1500 if you buy an equivalent, main battery half the price and 30% larger from CATL in China.

Anyway I pressed on. The service manager at BMW told me he could easily have coded the 4g TCB he fitted, if the BMW software did not stop him, told me to find a BMW serviceman who did not use ista. Now north Queensland in Australia is by no means a big area for service folk outside of BMW themselves, however I did find one and after 30 minutes and $250 the 4g TCB was now fully coded to the car. Error messages gone 4g TCB now fully functional. I have now sent my email to BMW Connected Drive Services informing them the car is now fully functioning 4g ready, and given them my new IMEI and ICCID and await their response. For the uninitiated, the IMEI is your unique identifier and the ICCID is your sim which is hard wired in the TCB module. In other words the lies that the BMW website and the BMW staff tell you that a 4g upgrade is impossible, is just that, lies. All of the so called 3g built in can never be replaced, wrong, it is all in the TCB stand alone module and can easily be replaced.

I have so far heard the most outlandish lies you can imagine from them, what they don't get is when you lie you can easily be caught out by fact. Case in point, according to them if way back when your car was new and the 3g part in the car failed, by their logic BMW would have had to give you a whole new car because the 3g component was so baked in it could not be replaced. Really? In Australia the i3 and many other models at the time were sold with lifetime services subscription, which still shows when you log in to Connected Drive, so why don't they want us to upgrade, sadly an ongoing lifetime data connection to a telco, BMW, one would have expected a better level of service than a shabby litany of lies and cheap skating on a lousy data connection.

In the meantime my 2016 BMW i3 Rex with 150000km on it now has a fully functional 4g TCB, the ball is in your court BMW despite the rubbish you have so far served up. Failure to connect then the next stop will be with the ACCC, then the media, then a lawsuit.

 

[EvanstonI3]

So came out of retirement and went to work again and have been busy. However I have followed through, after purchasing the 4g TCB for my i3 I had to lean on the local dealer hard to fit it (extremely negative Google review) so they relented and fit my BMW original 4g TCB as fitted to the 2018 i3 which threw an error on the dash as it was not the original 2016 part.

You bought a used TCU from a used 2018 model?

 

[Tezza]

You bought a used TCU from a used 2018 model?

No I bought a brand new one from BMW Spare parts, it's so generic it's embarrassing for BMW its in many of their models

 

[alohart]

So came out of retirement and went to work again and have been busy. However I have followed through, after purchasing the 4g TCB for my i3 I had to lean on the local dealer hard to fit it (extremely negative Google review) so they relented and fit my BMW original 4g TCB as fitted to the 2018 i3 which threw an error on the dash as it was not the original 2016 part. This opened to me a whole series of questions regarding legality of blocking the fitment of any other electrical component in the car, non BMW aircon compressor, main battery or literally anything electrical. The first step of installation BMW ista looks for only the original BMW part and blocks the rest of the coding if it does not see it, that's a monopoly and allows price gouging.

I'm certainly no expert in this area. However, I'm guessing that like many BMW replacement parts, your replacement telematics control unit must be registered with the appropriate electronic controller before it will function. This makes sense because much automobile hardware is controlled by software that must know the type of hardware installed to function correctly. In some cases, new software might need to be installed. It's not like the old days. I doubt that BMW is doing anything nefarious.

There are plenty of cheaper components available for the i3, the aircon compressor $4000 in Australia $1500 if you buy an equivalent, main battery half the price and 30% larger from CATL in China.

The challenge would be to get the system software to function correctly with the new hardware. Maybe this is similar to PC hardware where the software driving the hardware must comply with system standards to function correctly. There have been plenty of heartaches due to incompatibilities among various installed PC hardware. Does the $1,500 A/C compressor equivalent function correctly with an i3's system software. Doesn't matter that the compressor can compress if it doesn't interface correctly with the i3's system software. Same with the CATL battery pack, but maybe even worse if the bundling of its battery cells isn't sufficiently crash-resistant which could lead to a battery pack fire.

The service manager at BMW told me he could easily have coded the 4g TCB he fitted, if the BMW software did not stop him, told me to find a BMW serviceman who did not use ista. Now north Queensland in Australia is by no means a big area for service folk outside of BMW themselves, however I did find one and after 30 minutes and $250 the 4g TCB was now fully coded to the car.

I don't understand why the dealer couldn't use ISTA to program the replacement yet another BMW mechanic could, somehow, without using ISTA. Did the dealer really know how to use ISTA? Did the dealer have an ISTA and maybe data file versions that were suitable for the job? Lots of unknowns there…

I have now sent my email to BMW Connected Drive Services informing them the car is now fully functioning 4g ready, and given them my new IMEI and ICCID and await their response.

I believe that this is where others who have done the same replacement have run into a brick wall. Unless BMW is willing or maybe able to make these changes, you'll be stuck with a worthless 4G telematics module. Do we know whether BMW's software can register a 4G IMEI and ICCID for a car that didn't include a 4G telematics module? Integrating software from a variety of hardware manufacturers must be a nightmare. Legacy auto manufacturers aren't known for their software prowess.

 

[Tezza]

Sorry mate you massively over analysed that. A bmw service centre installed it. Showed me the ista software first looks at the bmw part number then blocks the rest of the steps which are simple coding. He told me if he had any other software than ista he could code it in ten minutes. If BMW did not have the first step in their software any compatible device for any part of the car could be simply coded. The other mechanic had Bosch software and coded it perfectly and easily in ten minutes. There is no writing special software for anything special its just filling the boxes with basic info. People really need to grasp bmw are screwing owners.

 

[alohart]

People really need to grasp bmw are screwing owners.

I can just see BMW executives sitting around figuring out how to screw their customers:

Dude 1: "Hey, let's design ISTA software so that it prevents a 3G i3 owner from installing a 4G telematics module."

Dude 2: "Great idea!"

Or maybe not every conspiracy theory is true. Maybe because no one paid BMW for 4G cellular data service in 3G i3's, why should BMW?

As the former owner of a 2014 U.S. i3 that lost its connectivity to BMW servers when 3G data service was discontinued, I'm interesting in knowing when BMW registers your 4G telematics module so that it does something useful.

 

[watersb]

Current 2014 i3 BEV here.

I could believe that a 2014 lacks the "device drivers" or whatever It needs to know about a 4g TCU, but it should be possible to integrate. And you did it!

As a recovering software developer, I can also imagine that BMW programmers never fully integration-tested a formerly 3g-equipped i3 upgraded with a 2018 TCU. Oh, the liabilities, if they trigger a bug and manage to brick your car over the air! Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt! Tort reform!

So it's 30% software and 70% law-fare.

In my imagination.

But I'd love to try it.

 

[The-Traveler]

I just did a retrofit in m i3 from NBT to NBT EVO and I’ve done this in my E 92 as well.

The first generation unit is connected to the TCB using a USB connection. In order to get the new 4G module which is called an ATM you need a specific harness because it’s wired and completely differently to the car and it also communicates over ethernet not USB.

I’m working on getting a harness for the I3, but I have done this in the E series with an emulator. Basically there’s no upgrade path unless you change the head unit as well because the old unit cannot be coded to use the ATM module because it did not exist at the time.

Now, if you do upgrade to the EVO unit to get CarPlay and such, you don’t have to put on the ATM if all you will do is use CarPlay. But if you want everything to work, you will need to order a new ATM using your Vin and they will Let you retrofit that in with us after you get everything else working.

There is a thread on the Internet I’ve seen where someone got this to work. The problematic part here is that if you buy the EVO unit you need activation codes and typically you pay people online a couple hundred bucks to generate those for you and set everything up. Those codes aren’t accepted by BMW and so I don’t know if they will hassle you and make you buy that through them, which I can’t imagine how much that would cost.