2018 BMW Active Tourer infotainment four years on
How does the sixth generation of BMW iDrive (ID6) fare in the long run?
Expectations
To be honest, I did not have a remarkably high expectation of the built-in navigation and infotainment when buying the car. My philosophy has always been to rely on my smart phone for navigation and entertainment use cases and use the car as an audio accessory.
Mobile devices evolve very quickly and improve with each generation so that most people upgrade their phones every two years and we become used to extremely refined user experience. Cars, on the other hand, typically rolled out with infotainment which was already outdated when they left the factory gate. Except for Tesla, the traditional car manufacturers were not particularly good at developing and maintaining in-car infotainment features.
On the other hand, BMW became quite famous for its iDrive system originally launched in 2001 and refined over the years. Our Active Tourer came with the sixth generation iDrive 6 (ID6), so I decided to give it a chance.
Navigation
Let’s start with the most important feature — the built-in navigation. The Czech Republic is a small country, and I was used to do most of my driving without navigation in the not-so-distant past. It is not possible anymore. Not because of inability to memorize route from point A to point B, but because of traffic jams, accidents, and frequent road closures. In-car navigation thus became essential to car travel.
There was one additional reason to try the built-in navigation. BMW claimed that its navigation communicates with the power train to optimize battery usage, using the internal combustion engine on highways while saving battery for clean city driving.
Prior to Active Tourer, I used to do most of my navigation with Google Maps and Waze. So, when I started driving the Active Tourer, I would typically plan trips with BMW navigation, but keep Waze or Maps running on my cell phone for comparison. I got mixed results initially. The BMW maps were not always up-to-date, and the navigation was slow to reroute when traffic conditions changed. Both Google Maps and Waze were better suited for difficult traffic situations. One thing I noticed though was about estimates: both Maps and Waze tend to be overly optimistic about the arrival time, while BMW is very conservative. It was fun watching the arrival times converge over the duration of a trip.
On the other hand, the usability has always been excellent. All actions can be performed using the famous iDrive controller while driving with minimal distraction. It is extremely easy to adjust the route by adding intermediate stopovers such as gas stations, restaurants, or other points of interest. It is also possible to quickly check alternate routes and routing options while driving.
About two years ago, there was a period when I ended up in a traffic jam several times, or the navigation led me to road closures, and I got fed up. At that point I decided not to renew BMW subscription for map updates and real time traffic information (RTTI). I put a suction cup cell phone holder on the dash and started driving with Waze again. Two months later, I was back on BMW subscription. iDrive 6 unfortunately does not support Android Auto and using navigation on dash-mounted cell phone was just a terrible and unsafe user experience for me.
I have kept the subscription since then and I must say that the navigation seems to have improved in the past two years. While maps are still off sometimes, mostly showing new roads which have not been finished yet, the traffic-based rerouting is more agile and triggers more often when needed.
Music — Spotify Gone…
The second most important use-case for me is the ability to play music. When I was about to purchase the car, BMW was heavily advertising the Spotify integration. One more reason for me to ditch Google Play Music back then and switch to Spotify. I could pick my favorite playlists and song radios right on the infotainment screen by using the iDrive controller knob. No need to reach out for the infotainment touch screen or the cell phone.
All good, until the summer of 2020 when Spotify decided to ditch the integration. (See the story on BMW Blog below.) Obviously, BMW blamed Spotify pretending it could not afford to write a check and pay two or three engineers at Spotify to maintain the existing integration. While some companies such as Tesla are providing new infotainment features through over-the-air updates, BMW has been happy to take features away.
Android users lose Spotify integration with BMW iDrive 6 — www.bmwblog.com
Spotify users were able to connect their Android-powered smartphones to BMW’s iDrive 6 infotainment system. That’s not the case anymore
Sure, you could still listen to Spotify or any other music app over Bluetooth, but you could no longer control it through iDrive. The only actions available in iDrive are next/previous track and volume control. All the other things need to be done on the cell phone, which is inconvenient and outright dangerous while driving. Sure, you can always try luck using a voice assistant, but it is hit or miss, especially in the multilingual context of the Czech Republic.
Lesson learned hard in this case is that Android Auto is a must-have feature in my next car.
My BMW Companion App
An extension to the BMW ID6 is a companion app. It used to be called BMW Connected, later renamed My BMW. The app allows you to remotely check the status of the car, its location, and control some of its functions such as locking / unlocking doors or even air-conditioning prior approaching the car. That is one of the benefits of a plug-in hybrid car: thanks to the built-in battery, you can pre-condition the car, which comes in handy both in scorching summer as well as freezing winter.
Another function I frequently use is trip planning. The app allows me to find location and send the address remotely to the car. Upon entering the car, the target location awaits me in the infotainment inbox, and it is just a click of the iDrive controller away from getting it loaded in the navigation.
Conclusions
As you can see, the BMW iDrive 6 infotainment has been a mixed experience for me. I like its simplicity and responsiveness. I love the ability to control most functions using iDrive controller on the center console. I was at odds with the navigation at times but got used to it and I continue using it most of the time. I remain unhappy about the multimedia control since Spotify integration was discontinued. While it allowed me to switch to Tidal for better sound quality at home, the quality improvement in car is negligible (but still audible).
The ID6 infotainment is sorely lacking over-the-air update capability, which became first available in ID7. I checked for manual updates on BMW Software Update site several times, but it always claims I have the latest version, even though I got two or three updates installed at the dealership during regular visits.
What concerns me is that the outlook remains mixed. While BMW now supports Android Auto and implemented over-the-air updates to allow their cars to evolve and improve, at the same time it is ditching the ingenious iDrive controller in the latest generation of its cars and relies solely on large touchscreens (and voice assistant) to control the infotainment and navigation. I am not sure I would call this development progress in the right direction…
Previous Issues
You might want to check out the previous articles in my Active Tourer series:
First Month of Active Touring — jgergic-tech.blogspot.com
My first impressions and reasoning behind buying this particular car.
Coasting Like a PRO — jgergic-tech.blogspot.com
Overview of multitude of BMW driving modes and how I tried to achieve the best fuel economy.
BMW Active Tourer in SPORT mode
Sometimes you might even forget it’s a family car…
2018 BMW Active Tourer Driving Autonomy
2018 BMW Active Tourer 225xe (PHEV) driving autonomy features: a lot to be desired in future BMW models.