Thread: e46 m3 - feeler
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Old 08-08-2017, 06:46 AM   #20
Terri Kennedy
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Join Date: Oct 2003
Carmudgeonly Ride: 2003 BMW 325xiT; looking for a new fun car
Location: New York
Posts: 2,939
Quote:
Originally Posted by equ View Post
He took it in for the rear parcel shelf speaker at least twice, maybe three times, got at least two new ones.
Could have been an incorrect diagnosis and it was actually a wiring harness problem. At least in this era, wiring harnesses were hand built on a per-vehicle basis and not tested - if the car worked well enough to drive it off the line and onto the transport ship, it was assumed to be good. Oddly, spare harnesses are built with all options and machine-tested. "Quality control" was left to the selling dealer and the customer.

My car (9/2002 production) had at least 3 factory wiring errors (that's all I've discovered, at least):

1) Mis-wire of auto-dimming mirror sensor into (non-existent on E46) "panic switch" for emergency assist. This resulted in my car calling BMW and telling them my airbags had deployed every time I drove it after dark on a road with potholes (the headlights from the car behind me would dip when it went through a pothole, and that was a sudden enough transition on the mirror sensor that it was interpreted as a panic switch press). Since there is no panic switch on an E46, the car's phone kit (genuine BMW) interpreted it as an airbag deployment and called BMW.

2) The aux input connector behind the navigation screen had the 3 pins in the wrong sequence.

3) The glove box flashlight socket was not wired to anything, so it never charged.
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