[akunamitat]

Hi all.

I know this is going to be such a funny q but I purchased my X5 in November and don’t really know all the electronics yet. I have my doors set to lock when I walk away.

I went to a car wash (drive thru ) my first experience I stayed in the car , car in neutral .. everything went fine but the warnings went crazy.

Second time I got out of the car and they told me to leave my keys in the car.

Well … the car locked .. with the keys in it.

I was freaking out bc it got to the end and it stopped and the car behind me kept going as we were trying to grab our phones to unlock the car so the guy can get in and pull the car up !!! JUST IN TIME.

I am completely nervous about getting my car washed now lol

Is there a setting or something I need to change ?? Why would the car lock with the keys in it ??

Tia 😊

[lackland]

Hopefully somebody else will give a more knowledgeable answer, but in the meantime:

The forums are full of messages from people 1) trying to figure out how to lock a spare key inside and the car refusing to, and 2) others swearing the car automatically locked their only key inside.

Particularly if it is on and moving, the car can lock a key inside, since it can be set to automatically lock the car when we drive it off. Hopefully, the car won’t automatically lock if we’ve unlocked it and it isn’t on and moving and we’ve left our only key inside.

But at the car wash, if the engine is on, the car is moving, and the key is inside…it is likely going to automatically lock if the auto-lock setting is on and the car wash is moving fast enough.

Even if the car isn’t on and moving, I wonder if the car is reading a phone as an additional “key,” and if the phone is outside the car, it will be willing to lock other keys inside.

Since the car will unlock and run when you use a connected phone as the key, even driving up to the car wash the car may have been reading your phone as the primary key of the day which had started it and driven it to the car wash and so ignored other keys for the purposes of walk-away automatic locking.

But somebody may have a better answer based on experiment or on an obscure entry in a BMW user documentation.

On a distantly related topic about the hazards of all these key fobs and digital phone and watch and credit card sized keys: my wife ended up stranded when she drove away from home and parked her car at a restaurant. I had started the car for her but then I’d stayed home, she had ignored the not very loud warning chime when she drove away, and ended up miles from home without any key.