Post
by Terry Kennedy » Tue Apr 13, 2010 5:43 am
[quote="MadMaxAtom and company"]
Yes indeed..boys and girls..those BOOBS at brammo had the coolant pump wired backwards,all this time.[/quote]
That may not have been entirely Brammo's fault. They had a rather large reject rate on wiring harnesses from their manufacturer. For anyone who visited Brammo back in the day, the large mound in the far corner of Tom's office was defective wiring harnesses.
And before anyone jumps in and says that's Brammo's fault for choosing a poor supplier or not testing, let me tell you a story:
BMW builds their main wiring harness themselves. Each one is custom built with only the options that are ordered with the car or selected as part of a "prep" option, like for the cell phone or CD changer. They do NO testing of the wirng harness - they just put it in the car and hope for the best. If something odd happens while the car is on the assembly like (like the horn blowing when the brake pedal is pressed) they'll investigate it, but there is no test plan to make sure everything works.
The selective build on harnesses is to prevent customers or dealers from ordering a low-spec car and then installing navigation, Xenon lights, and so forth. If you buy a replacement wiring harness, it comes with all of the possible options fitted. BMW figures that if you're crazy enough to pull the harness out of the car and swap it, you aren't doing it just to save a few bucks when ordering the car. Plus, stocking all the combinations would be prohibitive.
My car was built with 2 mis-wires that I know of. I found the first one shortly after delivery - the car would randomly call BMW and tell them my airbags went off. After a bunch of attempts by the dealer to fix this, I threatened to lemon-law the car. Finally they got a factory tech rep involved.
You need some background to understand the underlying problem. First, BMWs have an auto-dimming rear view mirror which consists of 2 parts - a large liquid crystal covering the whole glass, and a photo-sensor. When it detects light from the rear, it polarizes the crystal to a varying amount related to the amount of light. Second, some models of BMWs have switches in the headliner for things like BMW Concierge, Roadside Assistance, and so forth. My car has the auto-dimming mirror, but not the headliner switches (that's only available in the 5 series, not my 3).
Due to a mis-wire that routed the photo-sensor to the telephone control box, whenever there was a rapid transition from dark to light behind the car (for example, someone flashing their headlight on and off, or if they hit a pothole), the photo-sensor would cause the telephone control box to call BMW and report an accident. It didn't happen if the light level changed gradually, only if there was a rapid transition.
In the course of investigating how prevalent this sort of thing was, I found another BMW owner who said his rear-view mirror looked like a "lava lamp". It turns out that on his car, BMW had mis-wired the liquid crystal to one of the speaker wires.
The second mis-wire I found on my car was that the connector for the auxiliary audio input had 2 pins transposed. That meant that when optional aux in adapter was installed, it would not be detected by the stereo.
I actually spent over an hour in person with the Chairman / CEO of BMW USA (Tom Purves) as well as several hours on the phone with the manager of the BMW plant in Regensburg, Germany that built my car, discussing both my specific issue as well as the larger general problem - that a company can't expect final QC to be done by the dealer or the purchaser, and that stuff like this needs to be found and fixed at the factory when the car is being built. I didn't make much of a dent in their thinking, though.
There may be a few other unique things about yours as well.