DVDinmotion REx Hold Mod

[WoodlandHills]

Scroll up to my 3:04pm post from yesterday and you will find that I did drive the car.... And that it worked as promised.

I inserted the USB drive for 30 sec with the car on and in park. I removed the USb drive and turned off the car and locked it. End of procedure unless you consider coming back an hour or so later and unlocking the car to be an additional step.

Yes, the instructions are confusing and I have already suggested to them that they write dedicated i3 directions if they want to really be active in the NA market, but it can be done as is. The part about starting the engine is a bit vague for an EV, but turning the car on with the foot on the brake does the same thing. The real unclarity comes when they cannot tell you how long to leave the car turned off and locked. Twice I checked too early and had to start again. Perhaps each model has a different wait time, but they should just pick a time that works for everyone and use that. You can waste more time rerunning the process if you are too early that simply waiting a half hour longer.
BTW, you do not press the radio button to reboot an i3, you load the .bin file and leave the car locked: the alternative procedure in the instructions posted above.

 

[Idleup]

Many Thanks for the reply and post!

1) Do you recall what status your battery was when you performed the start?

2) My second and most important question: "Will the generator continue to run when the car is stopped????"

This would be a super feature since you could stop at your destination (say restaurant) and actually charge the battery instead of just maintain it at its current state.

Many Thanks

 

[WoodlandHills]

It's all in previous posts.... :roll:

Seriously Dude, did you even read them yet?

 

[Idleup]

Well excuse me for asking - I wouldn't want you to go though any extra effort here . . .

If you look at the threads you'll see we must have been posting at the same exact moment so I never looked above my message to see your post!

 

[websterize]

 

[mindmachine]

Many Thanks for the reply and post!

1) Do you recall what status your battery was when you performed the start?

2) My second and most important question: "Will the generator continue to run when the car is stopped????"

This would be a super feature since you could stop at your destination (say restaurant) and actually charge the battery instead of just maintain it at its current state.

Many Thanks

1. You can only start the Rex hold at 75% or below.

2. If you start your Rex hold at 75% and you are climbing a steep hill and the SOC drops below 75% in the process, the Rex will work to regain the 75% even if you pull over and stop the car it will run the SOC back up to 75%. You can't however run the SOC down to say 65% and then engage the Rex hold and expect it run back up to 75%

There is a video on youtube that was posted early in 2014, I think a guy in the Netherlands where he was sitting in the car stopped. The video shows him watching the Rex hold screen in the eDrive menu while with the Rex running and the SOC was climbing. You could hear the Rex running in the video while the car was stopped. In the video the SOC was 61.5 % at the start and he watched it climb up from there a few tenths of a percent.

 

[mindmachine]

Found the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqLEoCTsLo&index=8&list=PLt6C30nR-2fWvHbYAGuqOnQBrSWYTy9-Z

 

[Idleup]

Thanks for the informative reply!

I'm somewhat puzzled why BMW would elect to shut the RX down when the car stops, I could see it stopping when the ignition is turned off, but why go through that start and stop routine at every traffic light Hello! My guess is they might feel there needs to be some motion to move air around the engine and radiator.

Also If the RX is running and you are stopped, would not the current produced go to the battery. For me, my ideal system would be able to start the RX at will to include when I'm stopped, this way RX could be bringing the battery back to full charge when I'm at a Via and i could electric my way to the next destination.

There's little doubt that BMW only had the "Tree Huggers" in mind when they designed the US system, its terribly flawed!

 

[Idleup]

Great video - so it will charge the battery - that would be a perfect system!

 

[mindmachine]

Thanks for the informative reply!

I'm somewhat puzzled why BMW would elect to shut the RX down when the car stops, I could see it stopping when the ignition is turned off, but why go through that start and stop routine at every traffic light Hello! My guess is they might feel there needs to be some motion to move air around the engine and radiator.

Also If the RX is running and you are stopped, would not the current produced go to the battery. For me, my ideal system would be able to start the RX at will to include when I'm stopped, this way RX could be bringing the battery back to full charge when I'm at a Via and i could electric my way to the next destination.

There's little doubt that BMW only had the "Tree Huggers" in mind when they designed the US system, its terribly flawed!

Well I haven't tested it myself, but in the video the guy set the Rex hold at 66% and then drove the car hard to deplete the battery down to 61.5% (below the set point) and then he pulled over to stop (leaving the car on)and the Rex did run the battery back up to the set point of 66%. At least he implied that in the video. However once the set point is reached it won't go higher. He could have set it at 75% in the beginning and then it supposedly would have done the same thing, it would have run the battery back up to 75%. He also said you can't turn off the car or it won't work that way. I assume he meant it won't charge back up if you turn the car off and on again, but I am not sure.

As for the tree huggers, what really infuriates me is that BMW decided to make a North American CARB version for all 50 states in order to get CARB credits in the 15 states that have the CARB rules. In several of those states there is a financial benefit to the buyer. In most of the other 35 states we get nothing but a crippled car and many of us live in or travel thru areas where this is not satisfactory or even safe. There is no reason in my book other than the complications of managing the application of the software and car inventories, why the cars delivered in the other non CARB states could be delivered with the European Rex hold set up. Now I have ranted on here about this a lot and had other members get mad at me for going on and on about it, plus they claim I too benefited from CARB since it allows BMW to sell their ICE cars at a lower cost and they believe that the i3 would not be this cheap otherwise. Ok maybe so I won't argue that, but the fact remains, many CARB states provide a financial benefit to owners and I get nothing other then the pain in the ass of trying to enable the hold feature for myself along with all the associated risk.

PS:I did not buy or use the DVDinmotion for my car so I can't attest to the details of how it works.

 

[ATXMARC]

Thanks for posting the great video. Do you think a similar option allowing the rex to charge the battery back to 100% would be preferable to the hold option in the video, seems like i read the panamera hybrid does this? Seems like just a slight software tweak would do the trick but might just end up depleting the gas in the rex too quickly..so 6 of 1 vs half dozen of the other on a long trip?

 

[Idleup]

Great post and I'm sure your feelings are shared with many - while we can all blame BMW, the real culprit is the friggen government, a group of morons sit in some office and implement all these goofy regulations without considering the hardships it causes to the general public.

By the way, the guy who started this post just installed the DVDinmotion chip on in his car but I'm not sure if he said it would run while stopped, hopefully he'll give us an update.

Regards - Mike

 

[mindmachine]

Thanks for posting the great video. Do you think a similar option allowing the rex to charge the battery back to 100% would be preferable to the hold option in the video, seems like i read the panamera hybrid does this? Seems like just a slight software tweak would do the trick but might just end up depleting the gas in the rex too quickly..so 6 of 1 vs half dozen of the other on a long trip?

Interesting idea, but I haven't heard of anyone saying they have found the code to do it. The limit is 75% SOC when you enabled the Rex hold, one reason I can think of for not doing it, the battery won't accept the charge as fast as the battery approaches full. However that starts to occur closer to 85% or 90% SOC. When you charge the car at home the charge rate slows down I believe around the 85% or 90% SOC point. I suspect that unless the software has the proper algorithm to adjust to the needed slow down it could be bad for the battery life expectancy.

 

[mindmachine]

Great post and I'm sure your feelings are shared with many - while we can all blame BMW, the real culprit is the friggen government, a group of morons sit in some office and implement all these goofy regulations without considering the hardships it causes to the general public.

By the way, the guy who started this post just installed the DVDinmotion chip on in his car but I'm not sure if he said it would run while stopped, hopefully he'll give us an update.

Regards - Mike

Thanks!

I agree it is the government agency's ( CARB ), from what I have read gave BMW fits over the i3 Rex implementation.

Good luck with whatever you try. I talked with a local IT guy who coded a i3 using the OBD2 cable and computer, software and token key. This method cost about $50 to do yourself and you can code other things like turning on the am radio, remove warning chimes ect... Anyway he said you have to be very careful the first time to figure it out, but says the second time doing it should be easy. Which will be necessary after BMW updates which are coming when they replace the KLE and later again when they have another scheduled around March.

 

[mediziner]

Great post and I'm sure your feelings are shared with many - while we can all blame BMW, the real culprit is the friggen government, a group of morons sit in some office and implement all these goofy regulations without considering the hardships it causes to the general public.

By the way, the guy who started this post just installed the DVDinmotion chip on in his car but I'm not sure if he said it would run while stopped, hopefully he'll give us an update.

Regards - Mike

This way we always have enough battery to avoid the power collapse of a dead battery and a REx creeping along uphill at 6 mph.



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