My BMW Navigator VI is possessed

[Grumpy Goat]

I have finally had it with my BMW Navigator VI GPS and will be making a report to Customer Support soon, with the expectation that the unit be replaced.

This thread is to do 2 things: (1) document the problem with my unit, and (2) encourage any others with the same GPS unit who have had issues similar to this to also make their experiences known.

In a nutshell this is the problem, which appears to happen when the temperature is cooler. I live in Houston TX so it rarely gets to freezing. When the problem manifests itself, this happens.

I start the bike and soon after, the GPS starts "pressing various buttons" by itself. I am usually putting on my gloves at this time so am not touching anything on the bike, but screens start changing, you can see random buttons being depressed, etc.

When this is going on, I can try to tap certain buttons and the unit may respond. Other times there is no response to my screen tap. Gloves or no gloves makes no difference. If a dialog box pops up on its own and the screen is in one of its unresponsive modes, there is no way to dismiss the dialog box.

Using the job wheel I am able to flip through the usual screens, but at every screen it presses buttons, flashing up other screens in the process ... except for the compass screem, which since there are no buttons (other than "Back") stays stable.

Yesterday a new thing occurred ... while doing its devil dance, it decided to define a route to who-knows-where, and then started to tell me directions in my headset. Very irritating because I cannot intervene to cancel this route ... the screen does not respond to touch! So I am forced to turn the volume down on the headset or turn it off, thereby rendering that piece of equipment useless.

The unit has never been dropped, bumped, damaged in any way or anything of that nature. I am VERY careful handling this unit having paid over $900 for it. The electrical contacts on the back and on the cradle are clean, and have been re-cleaned in response to this behaviour.

I have rebooted the unit several times with mixed results, and initailly it seemed as though that helped but, progressively, it seems that that is no longer helping. I even (once) removed the battery to simulate a cold boot, and that seemed to work for a few days and then the behaviour resumed happening.

I reset the GPS back to factory settings and that seemed to work for a couple of days also, but then the problem came back.

The unit has the latest firmware and maps installed, and when it worked normally all functions worked as designed.

One of the videos I watched suggested that cleaning the screen helped the person in the video so I did that (not that it was dirty; ponly had a couple of smudges) and that helped for 5 minutes.

Suspecting the screen unit was the problem, I tried to recalibrate the screen and got as far as the dot in the lower left corner, but when I pressed it nothing happened - the screen was locked, and a reboot had to happen. then the recalibration screen with lower left dot was again presented on restart, requiring more reboots. That was when I removed the battery. Didn't try screen recalibration again.

I will be making a YouTube video of this behaviour to support my case, and when that is done will be making by report to Garmin Support.

I do note that a Google Search for BMW Navigator VI Problems returns a few hits but I have not [yet] found an answer to this, and I do not believe I should have to resolve this on my own.

The unit is defective.