F is Good and Don't Let No One Tell you Opposite

When I began this whole coding thing, it was both out of curiosity and necessity. I was curious what sorts of cool things BMW was keeping from us lowly North American buyers, and I needed to understand how to, well, undo that.

Since Disco Silver is of course an E46, that was the first car I dived into. Soon, it was E60s, E90s, and so on and so forth. This did present a challenge, however, since the newest E-series car was already nearing 5 years old, and if I didn’t figure out how to expand into the newer cars, I would be limiting myself.

But as many BMW enthusiast/nerds know, the change from E-series to the F-series (and i, and G, and so on) was revolutionary. Not only did the F-series cars come packed with more technology than ever before, they also changed their entire codebase and brought the entire system into the 21st century.

Where the E-series cars could be coded using programs that looked more at home in Windows 2000 than anything this side of 2010, the new cars required a different interface entirely. Modules are much more interconnected, and there is SO much more ability to change things precisely to one’s liking. Where in many cases, the older cars may have had a binary Yes/No option for a certain setting, there are often cases where the same option has interval adjustability. Yes, it helps to know how to write in hexadecimal, but that’s a pretty small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

“Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but how about an example?”

Glad you asked. Let’s compare the E90 3-series and the subsequent F30 3-series.

In the E90, you can set whether the car would beep upon locking it with the fob.
In the F30, you can not only set whether the car will beep or not, but you can also set a “night-time” mode so that it beeps quieter after some specific hour, and you can determine what exact time that is!

In the E90, you can enable a three-blinker lane-change behavior, or you can disable it.
In the F30, you can set however many blinks you’d like. 5? You got it. 10? No problem (but at that point, probably just engage the actual blinker).

These are two very quick examples – there are many, many more similar scenarios.

A year ago, if you had asked me what my favorite car to work on was, I’d say it was either the E90 3-series or E60 5-series. These days, I’d have to say it’s easily the F30 3-series.