[porterM]

I updated to 11/2023.42 today via app, which went pretty smoothly. However looks like the BMW nav software is messed up now as I noticed the map in the instrument display and the control display is not even displaying the location I'm in! I first noticed the car location just cutting across streets on the map instead of following in the direction of the highway I was in. Then when parked at home, I searched for my home address and started the nav, and it appeared as if the car was in another city miles away! Apple Carplay Maps working fine with GPS. Anyone else experiencing weird GPS drift issues with native NAV after the latest software update? Any suggestions on how to correct this?

[TurtleBoy]

I would try restarting iDrive and then let it do a sleep reset overnight and see how it looks in the morning.

[apw2607]

Yes, I had this issue after I updated too 11/2023.42

I park in an underground parking garage and the update was applied in the parking garage.

It was the same the following day. It took about 5 minutes of driving (with route guidance active) for the car to get its gps lock again.

For a while the nav thought I was driving in the ocean.

Another weird thing after the update. The LEDs on the buttons on the doors for massage seat and control of passenger seat didn’t illuminate after the update. That took about 12 hours to start working again.

[porterM]

Originally Posted by apw2607

Yes, I had this issue after I updated too 11/2023.42

I park in an underground parking garage and the update was applied in the parking garage.

It was the same the following day. It took about 5 minutes of driving (with route guidance active) for the car to get its gps lock again.

For a while the nav thought I was driving in the ocean.

Another weird thing after the update. The LEDs on the buttons on the doors for massage seat and control of passenger seat didn’t illuminate after the update. That took about 12 hours to start working again.

I also drove for a while with BMW route guidance on, but hasn't worked for me. Did you reset iDrive before it started working again, or did it just self correct after driving with NAV for a while?

Looks like this is not a totally new issue. Found some discussion in the X3 forum:

https://x3.xbimmers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1991063

Although peculiarly my issue seems to affect the native nav and not third party navigation apps in Apple Carplay or Android auto.

[apw2607]

No reboot.

Just drove it the next day and it reset itself.

I’m not really very happy with the nav in this X5 because every time its parked over night in the under ground parking garage, it always takes about a couple of minutes to properly lock onto the road I’m on when I exit the parking lot.

It’s the first BMW I’ve owned that has this problem. I mentioned it to the dealer but they just told me it’s working as designed.

[porterM]

I see, I've not experienced this GPS lag yet. I do have an update on my issue - last night i drove without connecting to apple carplay ( not intentionally, connection issue) and the native nav in the instrument panel and the control panel was actually working, I.e. GPS locked into my exact location and properly following in the direction of the car on map. So basically without apply car play, native bmw nav working as expected. With apple car play, native nav has some GPS defect but Apple maps and Google maps in carplay are fine.

[amitg90]

yes same issue , went to service center , they said this is known issue cannot do much . BMW will release patch fix for this !

[jad03060]

After a s/w update, it’s likely that all history is erased. For GPS to get a quick lock depends on a few things:
- actual view of enough satellites (takes at least three, and more are needed for altitude).
- valid ephemeris and almanac data. This can take up to 20-minutes to arrive as it is fairly long, and the data rate isn’t huge…consider, they are about 14.5K miles up in the air and don’t have a particularly strong signal

So, depending on what is cleared during a s/w update, it is not unusual for it to take some time to restore a good position report. The GPS signal usually won’t penetrate into an underground garage, and may not get through your roof to yours, depending on the orientation and thickness and construction. With good ephemeris data, and not an overly long time since it was tracking satellites, it can pick up quite quickly. That data, as it ages, becomes less accurate - essentially, it tells the receiver what satellites it SHOULD be able to see, so it starts by looking for them versus a general sky scan which can take much longer.

I don’t think any of the nav apps run on your phone are using the vehicle’s GPS antenna, and unless you’ve reset that or applied a major s/w update, it is not unusual that it could get a position fairly quickly via your phone. They also can utilize their cellular signal to help obtain a position. in a city canyon can also restrict your view of available satellites…the accelerometers and steering wheel positioning sensor can ‘coast’ your position for a bit without active GPS updates (why it can work going through a tunnel), but that will drift if it doesn’t get a fix again after a while.

Over time, the GPS satellites have become more powerful, but there’s still a fairly small constellation of working ones out there. Without obstructions, you should almost always get a track, but trees, terrain, buildings can all block them, and those at low angles are more likely to become blocked. One directly overhead is kind of rare, though. They rotate around the earth about twice a day except for the geostationary few (Part of the WAAS - wide area augmentation system) the USA that help provide improved accuracy when in view, but those provide corrections to the existing ones that may have drifted slightly from their projected orbit. Differential information tells the receiver the current error based on position, atmospheric variances, and probably some other factors that can improve the positional accuracy. I don’t know for sure that the BMW GPS receiver can use that information, but probably does.

Military channel on GPS relies on that but also at least two bands…each frequency propagates through the atmosphere at slightly different rates, unlike what would happen in a vacuum, so it can characterize the atmosphere and get a better location because of the slightly different arrival times of signals sent at the same time. Civilian receivers don’t do that unless they can also receive the Russian satellites (GLONASS) or the European system (Galileo) which operate on a different frequency.