Buying a new car can be both an exhausting and rewarding experience. The car buying process typically will entail hours of research and multiple test drives. But when you finally decide to move forward with one, all the work becomes worth it—or at least it should.
Content creator Meme (@scaredandsobbing) shares her excitement of getting a new BMW. However, the excitement was short lived after trying to customize her vehicle. She documents her issue in a TikTok that has generated over 171,800 views as of this writing.
“By the grace of god I got a vehicle. Woohoo! Anyways I’m sitting here and I’m like ‘I wanna personalize it. I wanna customize it. I wanna do a little coding. Play with the setting a little bit to see what I could do,’” Meme begins.
Then something went wrong.
“I press start engine and the engine is just stalling,” she says.
In a text overlay, she adds, “Bought a car and bricked it within 48 hours.”
BMW Panic
Meme says she started to panic that she may have messed with the code too much. She tried to turn off the engine and it continued to stall. After three presses, the BMW turned completely off. So she waited five minutes to try again, only to get the same result.
“I decided to play around with the setting and make the car undrivable,” she says.
Meme then shares that her BMW is parked behind her father’s car which means she’ll have to break the news to him sooner rather than later.
“I’m gonna have to call the tow truck because I am parked behind him. So the tow truck is going to come and I am going to tell the man, ‘listen I’m gonna throw in an extra $100, drop me off somewhere and I am going to start a new life. Because there is no way,’” she says.
Why Did The BMW Get Bricked?
Comments included a lot of speculation.
“So, there are no settings you can access in the car’s menus that would make the engine stall. Car manufacturers would not put anything in the menus that would allow consumers to ‘total’ their cars just by pressing a few buttons. You probably just ran the battery down sitting there playing with it without the engine running,” one person guessed.
“Obviously she was using BimmerCode bro,” another said.
“You said coding, which leads me to believe you’re using BimmerCode. You should have a backup of all the car's original settings before you start messing with it in your files somewhere,” a second agreed.
What Is BimmerCode?
BMWs can be customized using the BimmerCode app. This app allows BMW drivers to code the vehicle themselves to suit their personal driving preferences.
When using the app, drivers can adjust control units including air conditioning, ambient lighting, audio settings, cameras, and more. This app can also reveal hidden features.
To use the BimmerCode app, you just need an OBD adapter.
But if you do use BimmerCode and run into a problem or simply decide you don’t like the changes, default to the original settings that should be saved in backup.
As it turns out, Meme was using BimmerCode.
“Thankfully figured out the issue without needing to use the backup (I made way too many changes since the last one and didn’t wanna redo everything bc I barely figured it out the first time lmao),” she wrote in the comments.
To conclude the TikTok, she asks if anyone knows how to get rid of the split screen BMW iDrive setting. The viewers came through.
“For the split screen view, there’s an option to disable it within the iDrive screen, push the knob to the right to access the second view and then push the option button next to the knob and it should bring up a menu to swap what it shows or disable it,” one shared.
Motor1 has contacted @scaredandsobbing via email and TikTok direct messages. We have also contacted BMW via email. This post will be updated if either party responds.
