[sweetway]

I am in the process of speccing a '19 M40i. I have never owned a vehicle that had the features offered in the drivers assistance packages, and am not wild about have electronics overriding my own driving skills or hearing a bunch of beeps, bells or whatever. So, my questions are, what value do the drivers assistance package (and plus) offer and how well does it work in real use; i.e. is it intrusive? What does the 'plus' add to the basic package that is of value? Do people get this just because it is part of a 'package'? Can you program these features so that you are only getting what you want to operate? Thoughts please...

[r3t1cal]

Originally Posted by sweetway

I am in the process of speccing a '19 M40i. I have never owned a vehicle that had the features offered in the drivers assistance packages, and am not wild about have electronics overriding my own driving skills or hearing a bunch of beeps, bells or whatever. So, my questions are, what value do the drivers assistance package (and plus) offer and how well does it work in real use; i.e. is it intrusive? What does the 'plus' add to the basic package that is of value? Do people get this just because it is part of a 'package'?

Search is your friend

Driving Assistant vs Driving Assistant Plus vs None: https://x3.xbimmers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1486244

Try typing in driving assistance into search you'll find many more threads.

Originally Posted by sweetway

Can you program these features so that you are only getting what you want to operate? Thoughts please...

DA+ requires hardware that is only installed when you get the package.

[MrPorter]

Originally Posted by sweetway

I am in the process of speccing a '19 M40i. I have never owned a vehicle that had the features offered in the drivers assistance packages, and am not wild about have electronics overriding my own driving skills or hearing a bunch of beeps, bells or whatever. So, my questions are, what value do the drivers assistance package (and plus) offer and how well does it work in real use; i.e. is it intrusive? What does the 'plus' add to the basic package that is of value? Do people get this just because it is part of a 'package'? Can you program these features so that you are only getting what you want to operate? Thoughts please...

Just ordered mine with both.

DA (ZDA) gives you blind spot monitoring and lane departure warning. I think it's BS that you have to buy a package to get blind spot monitoring on a BMW, but here we are. That feature is a must-have for me personally, so this package was more of a necessity than a desire for me.

DA+ (ZDB) adds lane keeping assist (instead of just telling you you're leaving the lane, it will keep you from straying if you accidentally doze...and presumably does something to jolt you awake), an amped up frontal collision warning/mitigation system (will help you brake and ideally keep you from hitting any pedestrians crossing the street when they shouldn't be), and active cruise control (which looks at the car in front of you in stop and go traffic and keeps you moving in traffic jams without having to do it yourself).

Whether you value any of those things is entirely up to you. Some people think "I can avoid hitting people crossing the street myself!" and that's true...in most, but probably not all, situations. Other people either don't sit in enough jammed traffic to want ACC, they give a similar response to the one I just made about collision mitigation, or they just aren't comfortable with the idea of semi-autonomous driving.

Regarding what you can and cannot disable in iDrive, that would be better left to those who have those features already and have been in the same boat as you...or you can call BMW Genius and have them dig into it with you.

[Ragnarkov]

one of the only features you can't reduce or shut off is the pedestrian collision part. There just aren't options for it, it's on all the time. everything else can be fiddled with.

The adaptive stop and go cruise is phenomenal, whether you are in stop and go traffic or on a busy highway. I was using a combination of this + lane control assist (which you can toggle on/off at any time), and I literally just hung my wrist on the top of the wheel to keep in contact, and the car drove itself. stayed in the lines, sped up to my set cruise, or slowed down in traffic.

couple of things. it will completely brake to a full stop. it give a 1-2 sec window incase a vehicle moves in front, otherwise it stops. you can either feather the pedal or hit resume on the steering wheel, and it will take off from stationary by itself. it's amazing.

lane departure warning (can be turned off in idrive) is what warns you if you are crossing a line without indicating. it comes on at 70km/hr, and vibrates the wheel and starts to compensate with some added steering adjustment. it's kinda cool, but definitely weird the first few times.

few things to watch out for. if you are in dence traffic, it seems to have a harder time finding lane lines, and might not be accurate. also, if there's people that encroach on your lane ahead of you, even if they don't change lanes, it will detect and compensate. might even do this if you get too close to a retaining wall on a corner. so again. be careful. should never use any if these features without still paying attention to the road.

all in all, I find these features awesome.

and there's a lot more I could go into. do some reading of the manual about what can be fiddled with or turned off. and actually put yourself in scenarios (controlled of course) to see what and how the features work. much better than having your car want to take control on a busy highway and you not being ready for it.

[Njerts]

I agree, I use lane assist + adaptive cruise control a lot.
A bit more info on lane assist that I found out.
If you see the green steering and 2 green lines, it is following the lane markers.
If you only see the green steering and grey lines, it is following the car in front of you.

That means if the car in front of you move around in the lane you will too. ;-)

And that goes without saying, Grey steering and grey lines, means lane control is not active.

[PvtDexter]

Originally Posted by Njerts

I agree, I use lane assist + adaptive cruise control a lot.
A bit more info on lane assist that I found out.
If you see the green steering and 2 green lines, it is following the lane markers.
If you only see the green steering and grey lines, it is following the car in front of you.

That means if the car in front of you move around in the lane you will too. ;-)

And that goes without saying, Grey steering and grey lines, means lane control is not active.

Sounds like the Ultimate Riding Machine. The way people drive today, I would not be too excited about my car following the vehicle in front of me.

[SPMor]

For a short while I drove the new Volvo XC40 with adaptive cruise control and observed one thing. In high volume traffic / ques the ASS would be kicking in and if the wait took longer than about a minute, it would reset the Adaptive funcion meaning that you had to accelerate yourself (turn engine back on in ASS function). So I ended up having to turn off ASS before travel to use the ACC in traffic. Can anyone tell me if ASS is interfering with X3’s steering assist/auto start and go cruise control?

[badgermobile]

For me, getting ZDA and ZDB was mainly for the auto-braking feature to protect other drivers in the family.

ZDA's autobraking feature is a camera-only system that can autobrake under 50 mph.

ZDA's recognition ability is limited by what the 2D camera sees, and by how good/bad the algorithms are in analyzing the camera's live video to recognize cars and pedestrians. Because it's camera-analysis-based, the angle, lighting, weather, and even colors may adversely affect the ability to recognize whether a car is a car, and whether a pedestrian is a pedestrian. Moreover, a 2D camera cannot sense depth and distance. A car 100 feet ahead may appear as a small box, and a pedestrian as a stick figure. It cannot analyze, warn the driver, or autobrake until much closer to the object. Detection range is thus a natural limitation of cameras in general. This lack of range reduces the realistic effectiveness limit to more like 30 mph, rather than 50 mph. Anything faster than 30 mph, and the camera simply won't see it in time.

ZDB adds a radar that works together with the ZDA camera to autobrake at any speed. This is why buying ZDB requires buying ZDA. The 2019 pricing guide lists a sub-feature called ZN0 under package ZDB. The ZN0 is called "Extended collision mitigation" where extended means autobraking above 50 mph.

This radar is mounted in the undergrill, and is the same radar used in ACC.

ZDB is much superior because the radar and camera working together enhances the recognition of cars and pedestrians. The radar waves that emit forward and bounce back can more definitively detect the presence of an obstacle than a camera can alone. Radar can also detect objects at much longer ranges. If the radar and camera recognize the same obstacle to be a car or pedestrian, the two systems reinforce each other's analysis.

As the autobraking has started to mature, many manufacturers have done the same thing as BMW in separating the camera-only feature from the radar-added feature. The camera-only feature often comes standard or cheap, while the radar-added feature usually comes in a more expensive package that also has ACC.

Mazda, for example, has identical package separation:
Smart City Brake is their camera-based system, and is standard on the base trim of the CX-5.
Smart Brake is their radar-added system, and is part of a package on the base trim.

However, Volvo's City Safety and Lexus' LSS+ are more generous in that those systems combine the camera and radar, and they're standard on the XC60 and NX.

BMW charges for both ZDA and ZDB, which is what BMW usually does: charge for everything. But they have such a strong brand swagger that they don't need to yield to any pressure to give away free stuff.

[Ragnarkov]

Originally Posted by SPMor

For a short while I drove the new Volvo XC40 with adaptive cruise control and observed one thing. In high volume traffic / ques the ASS would be kicking in and if the wait took longer than about a minute, it would reset the Adaptive funcion meaning that you had to accelerate yourself (turn engine back on in ASS function). So I ended up having to turn off ASS before travel to use the ACC in traffic. Can anyone tell me if ASS is interfering with X3’s steering assist/auto start and go cruise control?

from my experience so far, it doesn't interfere. if you are using ASS and adaptive stop and go cruise, doesn't matter if you are idling or sitting in ready state. when the vehicles start moving, you just need to tap the resume button or feather the gas pedal slightly to kick in cruise again. I've noticed with ASS, it seems to detect when the cars ahead start moving, so it will autostart the engine when they move, but you still have to engage forward motion manually.

Sometimes ASS will kick in and sometimes it won't (based on battery levels, engine temp etc), but should have zero impact on how the stop and go cruise works.

I have found the system to work almost flawlessly thus far.

[ricfsantos]

Do you guys have seen this system?

They promise enable autonomous driving level 2 in car that just have regular cruise control. Is open source solution, that is good. Hope they can support the BMWs.

[dan321]

I have the driver's assistance + package and that was one of the key things that attracted me to the X3. I really like the fact that if I for some reason I lose attention momentarily and drift out of a lane it will push me back into it.

The active cruise control is great. The chirping you get when you start getting close to a bollard when you are parking are something I appreciate, likewise the overhead view too.

Overall it is not intrusive at all in "normal" driving but I can see where when pushing things to edge in it might be. But that's not my style at all. But almost all the driver assist tech can be turned off.


I understand the desire for a bare bones car with no tech getting between you and the wheels, but things like driver's assist cannot be added after the fact. Test drive a M40i with all the driver's assist features in it before you make up your mind.

[r3t1cal]

I got my M40i last Wednesday with DA & DA+. This weekend I had a chance to put a nice 50 mile freeway jaunt under my belt. Ranging from 70mph to stop and go traffic.

Oakland, CA to Petaluma, CA

Once I got on the freeway I turned on the ACC and lane keep assist and did not touch the accelerator till I got off the freeway in Petaluma. It was an absolute surreal experience.

In stop an go it was so nice to not need to be hovering between the break and accelerator. My wife was getting so nervous when it was going 50mph towards traffic when we would have already started to coast/slow down if we were driving. But it hit the brakes and came to a wonderful crawl (lol - no crawl is really wonderful)

The open road 70+ mph was also nice but not as necessary as those were times where I made wanted to drive a little more "spiritedly" with sport plus and varying speeds

I'd say if you do lots of freeway driving and live in an area where stop and go traffic is the norm, then get the DA & DA+. Like dan321 said, if you don't get the option you can never spec it later. If you don't end up using it daily that's okay. But when you want to use it you will love the comfort, security, and ease of use.

On Friday my friends and I will be taking the car on a major road trip.

Petaluma, CA to Portland, OR

This will be a great break in period and I'm interested in getting everyone's opinion on the drive and tech. I'll be reporting back with a huge post of photos and thoughts once I'm back next week.

[BMWGuySweden]

The real benefit of the DA+ is in traffic situations. I live in Stockholm and have a lot of traffic were the assistance system is wonderful. Takes a lot of stress out

[Alexm1982]

Is there a way to get DA after delivery? I ended up getting an unheard of deal (so good I think the deal might not have been legit) but the car on the lot didn’t have DA.

[DigiSage]

Originally Posted by Alexm1982

Is there a way to get DA after delivery? I ended up getting an unheard of deal (so good I think the deal might not have been legit) but the car on the lot didn’t have DA.

No