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621372 miles (999999KM) on 2000 323ci cluster mileage maxed out now what?

27K views 177 replies 50 participants last post by  kburger 
#1 ·
Hey fanatics kburger here. decided to start a new thread. instrument cluster maxes out at 999,999 KM or 621372 miles. Now the mileage wont increment. Any suggestions? i was going for a million miles on the car now looks like thats not possible.
 
#55 ·
a short reply for you folks that want the story in this car. There's way too many stories. pretty much nothin i havent fixed. some interesting points. engine is original. cylinder head has never been removed. oil was mobil 1 5/30 synthetic for first 500,000 miles. then had to do hydraulic lifters. toughest mechanic job i ever did. you dont need to remove head for that btw. oil additives will buy you a couple hundred K miles but in the end you gotta replace lifters. use umm, forget the company. dont need OEM lifters thats a HUGE ripoff. you listen to the engine without background noise from the driver seat with door all the way open hood up and down. Buy better than OEM quality parts where appropriate. an OEM IHKA module at 500 bucks is NOT appropriate for OEM. that cost me 50 bucks. you use OEM where you need to. you fix stuff when it breaks or is going bad. stock a few basic items like fuel pump, water pump. highly recommend MP stewart water pump very nice. you install stuff that lasts. oil after 500K is shell rotella t6 synthetic diesel oil. warn ya it will expose your oil leaks and force you to fix them. best oi there is for these cars. wont rebuild engine till i gotta. never did that before should be interesting. LOTTA rust on the car. proper application of POR 15 following the instructions to the letter nothing better out there. I could talk for weeks about the car. M56 valve cover highly recommend. stock CCV way overengineered, expensive, and difficult to change, time consuming. not knocking bmw engineering you just gotta know where to "cut back" a little on the overengineering. thanks fanatics you are the best!
 
#59 ·
am I the first one to max out the mileage on the cluster? The dealer has told me they need to replace my cluster with a new one and program to zero. That should include syncing the LCM to avoid the tamper dot. I talked to BMWNA on the phone they were very nice. They created a case for me and are going to find out if they can help me or not. I'm trying to get BMW to pay for it
 
#63 · (Edited)
You***8217;re probably the first to hit it naturally. There have been a few sporadic cases over the years where an electrical glitch caused it to max out.

If they replace the cluster, the cluster will pull its mileage from the LCM, that***8217;s by design. Replacing both the cluster and LCM at the same time might set it to 0, or it might pull the mileage from elsewhere (EWS module maybe)
 
#70 ·
no new updates. But i will pursue this till the end. Thanks everyone great input from all. I will talk to DMV. If you search kburger you will see the history and all my threads and posts. you will see my goal has always been to get to a million miles. ummm, LEGALLY!! i never knew something like this might not make that possible. I dont wanna make this a lawyer issue i may have to. If you think about how many e46's are on the road others will undoubtedly max out like i have. So BMW needs to address this. I think its been complicated by the tamper dot and the redundant storage of mileage by LCM for sure and maybe EWS modules? I will be using the contacts you folks have provided to get more attention to this. Oh, btw i have been tracking mileage with ultraguage since the cluster broke i have 58K more miles so thats what, 678,000 miles :)
 
#71 · (Edited)
I bet FCP hates you :rofl:

After pondering this, it seems like what BMW should really do is issue a firmware update for the cluster, installed upon demand as people need it, that lets the mileage go to 1,000,000 and then roll over.

... or at least just roll over, even if it means happening at 621,XXX miles (which is worse).

I'm having trouble imagining you not having a tamper dot, with the LCM and cluster thinking you have different amounts of miles on the car.
 
#72 · (Edited)
Not feasible. Cluster doesn't have updateable software (officially or unofficially). They'd have to design a new cluster with different software and probably a different eeprom. This is also far from unique to BMW - pretty much everything out there maxes out at either 500k or 1M KMs since the switchover to digital. In theory the internal counter can go to 1048560, but the car stops incrementing at 1M.

Mileage never triggers the tamper dot. Only a VIN mismatch between the instrument and cluster does. LCM itself stops incrementing at 300k KMs anyway. And the eeprom that holds the mileage can't rollover - it's deliberately designed that way to make it more difficult to roll back the odometer (obviously there are ways around that, but nothing that a dealer can do).
 
#74 ·
Ok the rep at bmwna is out the rest of this week travelling for work. she left me vm. so friday or monday i'll talk to her hopefully. and mike miller from car club scranton pa has been writing me he may do a story he needs some kind of permission i havent quite figured out something to do with where i live. i'll keep updating here when i get info. i may just do nothing with the cluster i track miles with ultraguage. but that kinda sucks cuz its not official. or is it? does ultraguage track by my vin? anyway to prove the miles on ultraguage are mine? and whose to say when i started using ultraguage and when my cluster quit? i just wanna get to a million miles legit. never thought it would be this hard. hard enough keepin the car goin. always a laundry list of stuff to fix. just gotta keep it safe and legal thats challenging enough. rust is real bad. POR-15 is the best treatment by far but it must be applied strictly according to the instructions.
 
#80 · (Edited)
yeah i think we are all expecting that initial bmw response .. so that’s why some cca intervention and/or media pressure might be helpful here.

i’m also hoping that someone takes this case as the impetus or legal reason to crack the cluster. . problem is that we are all fans of the car, and we don’t want to see a lot of used cars with bogus mileage on the market.

what i would like to see is a solution that allows the /addition/ of miles but not *subtraction. not sure if that can be done with a dme or cluster fix. my guess is that both would have to be patched somehow.
 
#83 · (Edited)
Oh, btw, my dealer did tell me what they wanted to do for the "fix". Just don't know if this is the only way to fix it. My dealer wants to put in a brand new cluster and set it to 0, program it to my car (sync to modules), then they do some kind of note for the vin saying its a rollover. I'm just not sure going forward if thats what they actually will do.
 
#84 ·
In my opinion the rollover is the best option. It keeps you nice and official and you get to continue logging miles. I don't think dealer tools allow setting the mileage at all so unfortunately you probably won't be able to do something like pretend the rollover happened at 500,000 to make the math easier for your local DMV. I just hope they gift the cluster to you and don't try making you pay dealer prices for it.

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#87 ·
Yes, they would of course need to supply all of the modules that store mileage at the same time. That's quite a big ask for BMW to supply. It's funny how we have the tools needed to do this sort of thing quickly and easily but it must be a significant investment of both time and money for this to be done officially. And if they screw up the order in which they change the parts the new modules will be irreversibly (for them) set to the highest value too. Imagine the bureaucratic effort needed for BMW to write out an official work instruction to put this together for a single individual. Definitely a big ask from them.

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#89 ·
It may be worth trying to make noise elsewhere. Forgive me because I am young and don't have to deal with anything of that magnitude, and this situation is definitely unique, but it may be worth reaching out to say, the attorney general and saying how you're afraid of the legality issues involved with registering your car and such, and how unhelpful the dealer is, and how they are making a manufacturing error/issue as a point to try to empty your wallet just to keep your vehicle road legal.

To be blatantly honest, I just see on Legal advice and Reddit that when all else fails with issues with large businesses, things just magically find a way to be resolved once noise is made upstairs. Watching closely and good luck
 
#90 · (Edited)
I don't think much will come of it. This isn't the first car for something like this to happen to (in fact I think some older Corollas stop counting at 299,999), and the general expectation with digital clusters has been that they'll stop counting at some point. Whether that's at 621xxx or 999,999 doesn't really make a material difference. Legally all that will happen is the same thing that happens to anything else - just brand the title as true mileage unknown and be done with it.

true that dutch. So like i said earlier, my dealer told me what the wanted to do. But i'm thinking more people will have the same problem, no? So they need to use me as the "guinea pig", and figure out the best/easiest way to resolve this. I need to keep logging miles "legally/legitimately". I will keep posting here as this progresses i see the interest here people are watching. If i dont post nothing is happening. Enjoying the conversation though you folks are smart :)
As long as you can arrange it so that you don't pay anything unless they successfully set the mileage to zero there's probably no risk. But I'd bet my kidney that there won't be an official fix of any sort.
 
#91 ·
BMW should be ashamed that it didn't think their cars would be loved and cared for so much that they'd make it past 999,999 kilometers. For shame, BMW.

I hope there's a software fix. Any chance you can reconfigure each space on the cluster to be 10X --in effect, getting rid of single miles...at least you'd see mileage increased...(obviously I have no idea what the code is hiding behind our cluster.)
 
#92 ·
Any chance you can reconfigure each space on the cluster to be 10X --in effect, getting rid of single miles...at least you'd see mileage increased...(obviously I have no idea what the code is hiding behind our cluster.)
that's a nice idea .. and might be better visually than a fixed offset / rollover..

So if the "mileage data field" (or whatever its called) in the instrument cluster or eeprom had one more bit (21 bits instead of just 20) with which to store the value, then would it be able to keep counting up to 2,097,120 kms or about 2 million kms?
so which of the modules store the mileage and would need to be modified to support the additional bit (DME, LCM, EWS, the cluster itself?).
 
#93 · (Edited)
but unfortunately i think you could read 49 USC 32703 as forbidding a well intentioned fix to the problem with the "designed tolerance":

A person may not***8212;
(1) advertise for sale, sell, use, install, or have installed, a device that makes an odometer of a motor vehicle register a mileage different from the mileage the vehicle was driven, as registered by the odometer within the designed tolerance of the manufacturer of the odometer;
(2) disconnect, reset, alter, or have disconnected, reset, or altered, an odometer of a motor vehicle intending to change the mileage registered by the odometer;
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a19091219/odometer-tampering-legal-illegal/
 
#98 ·
High mileage Bimmer owners are part of an incredible mini-division of the BMW enthusiast community. In a way, they’re akin to the wise old elders of the club .... It’s clear that the high-mileage community wear their achievements with pride, often times as a badge of honor—and they should.
thanks malia, great article.. yes there are some very knowlegeable folks here. and i am happy to see a few younger people buying these old cars to learn. sometimes older is better!
 
#100 · (Edited)
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