Its not just a BMW problem. None of the manufacturers seem to be thinking about what happens when things go wrong. The feel that going all electric on all of the controls is a good idea… The result is things like
Car catching on fire and then the parking brake releases, transmission goes into neutral – because there are no ‘physical’ connections to the parking brakes nor transmission any more. It is all done with electrical circuits.
There is even a report of a Mini Cooper trying to start when it caught on fire.
Car has electrical fire, starting in the dashboard and the doors will not unlock (in some cars, the door latch itself is also electrical). Corvette door latches are electrical, Kia locks can be disabled by the electrical fires that are the subject of a recent recall.
NOTE: I’m not an anti-tech Luddite. I first started programming computers at 14 years of age, graduated EECE, was principal/chief engineer in a defense contractor. I saw/reviewed code from some software engineers that I would not want to trust my life with, and this is in a defense contracting firm with requirements like DOD-STD-2167/MIL-STD-498 for mission critical software. (2167 was superseded by 498, then by IEEE 12207)
