Filed under: Cars — at 3:03 pm by jim

I was driving my car back from lunch just a little while ago… I had taken lunch at 1:00pm, and so I was heading back to the office at around 2:00pm.

Out of nowhere, my car beeped at me three times… “beep beep beep”.  What the hell?  It sounded just like my friend’s radar detector, which made this even more confusing.  If the car had a built-in radar detector, I’m sure I would have found out about it much sooner than now.

I looked for any other warning signs, but didn’t see any.  The car wasn’t overheating… it wasn’t low on gas… it didn’t have the Check Engine light on… and the “Check Control” said that everything’s ok.  So I drove it back to work, still a little freaked out, because the car clearly knew something that I didn’t know.

So I got back and checked bimmerforums.com for any information on this mysterious beeping… a quick search of the forums gave me my answer: I accidentally hit the Memo button at some point.  Up until now, I always thought that the memo button allowed me to record a voice memo that I could play back later… I had never actually tried it, but it seemed like the logical function, given its description.

Actually, the Memo button causes the car to beep three times on the 59th minute of every hour (12:59, 1:59, …) as a reminder to tune into the news on the radio.  Apparently Germans love to check the hourly news for traffic and weather updates.  So in response, BMW added a button to the car for this one specific purpose.

This is the first time that I’ve found a feature in my car and thought, “Wow, that’s the dumbest feature ever.”  Hopefully I won’t find any other features like that.