Is BMW's Digital Dumpster Fire Almost Out?

May 30, 2024

For years, I have criticized BMW Motorrad’s failure to create a well-integrated set of digital experiences on their motorcycles. In 2020, I called out their feature-poor, underperforming, overpriced hardware that didn’t interface well with BMW’s own instrument clusters. I urged them to enable Apple Carplay, which is what most people are demanding. Harley-Davidson, Honda, and Indian all led BMW in offering this most in-demand feature.

Good news and bad news came of this. The good news is that BMW heard the demand from me and many other riders. The bad news is that their arrogance and digital ineptitude kept them from doing what customers were asking. In my 2021 follow-up, BMW addressed my specific request and criticism, saying,

“No, we don’t think that we are better than Apple or Google at digital solutions, but maybe we are better at motorcycle riding.”

Sure, BMW, that has enabled you to build great motorcycles. But four years later, you have still failed to deliver the digital elements of motorcycling that are anything shy of embarrassing.

Fortunately, the electronics industry has stepped in to succeed where BMW has failed with a clean, simple, Carplay (and Android Auto) solution.

What BMW Did with Software

In their fit of arrogant, “We know motorcyclling,” BMW Motorrad doubled-down on their mobile application. The app is okay for ride tracking and basic mapping. It’s abysmal for anything else. BMW’s idea of “sharing a ride” doesn’t involve sending a live or recorded track to your friends. It doesn’t involve actually sharing your ride, with start and end points, and position reports.

It has no concept of friends, or position-sharing with groups.

Rather, BMW’s idea of sharing your ride is sharing a picture with a tiny splash of data on top of it, like duration, temperature, and a useless route shape with no positional data on a map. Here’s the motorcycling experts idea of a shared riding experience… a single photo with no position information at all:

This is so uninteresting that I have never once seen one of these shared outside of my own tests. Never in the forums, never on enthusiast blogs; it’s a total miss. You could always export your routes and share them manually as I do in posts here, but every GPS and most phone apps have allowed this long before BMW tried to reinvent the digital wheel.

What BMW did with Hardware

While BMW missed the mark only once with software, they managed to miss it twice with hardware!

First miss: a cradle in a cradle

The first miss was the release of the BMW Connected Ride Cradle. This is essentially a phone mount for your motorcycle equipped with BMW’s Navigation Prep feature.

This means it’s a cradle that goes into a cradle. And it’s not terribly useful for anything other than basic navigation. Here are the shortcomings that make it an incomplete solution:

• It’s landscape-mode only for your phone, so it’s difficult to do anything besides BMW’s limited app experience.
• Phones aren’t as weather- and vibration-hardened as dedicated GPS units, so there is risk to one’s expensive phone in extreme conditions.
• The cradle’s length and width are adjustable for most phones, but not the depth. This means that you cannot use most phone cases in the cradle. The “bite” of the cradle is severely compromised with even the thinnest of cases.
• This is a cradle that goes into a cradle. You’re cradling your cradle that cradles your phone. It’s a wonky German rendition of Russian dolls.
• If you receive a notification and respond to it with touch or voice, the experience is basically destroyed as you’re trapped in a landscape mode with no easy way to navigate the experience.
• As of this writing, it averages about $260 USD. That’s stupidly expensive for a piece of plastic with a Bluetooth module. The price is explained by the logo molded into the plastic.

If all you want is a convenient phone mount for your Nav Prep-equipped BMW, and are satisfied with basic mapping and no other phone interaction, this might be an okay solution. Most of us want more.

Second miss: Obscene premium for anemic features

To address some of the challenges above like weather- and vibration-proofing, BMW released the Connected Ride Navigator. This is clearly a replacement to the overpriced, slow, and limited BMW Navigator V and VI that I reviewed as “Fewer features, at higher cost,” versus Garmin’s equivalent in my original post.

Sadly, BMW just can’t seem to escape the obscene pricing for limited features. The Connected Ride Navigator is a weather- and vibration-hardened device that basically runs the phone app that I mentioned above. It has some nice tricks like real-time traffic, better performance, and maps updates, but it averages $860 USD at the time of this writing. Nearly nine hundred dollars for a screen that runs a single phone app, and doesn’t do most of what people want from a modern CarPlay or Android Auto experience.

BMW can rightly claim to know motorcycling better than companies like Apple or Google. But they can’t claim to listen to what today’s riders want in a nav/comms experience. They continue to not just miss the bullseye mark, but miss the entire target with their pricing and feature set.

Third Parties to the Rescue

2024 appears to be the year that third party accessories developers are coming to the rescue. Their new products are putting out the dumpster fire that BMW created. There are several choices of displays that feature CarPlay and Android auto with varying degrees of integration with our bikes.

Best of all, they are filling the wish list that I shared, summarized as:

• Offer CarPlay and Android Auto
• Integrate with the existing Navigation Prep mount found on many BMW models
• Be weather- and vibration-hardened
• Work with gloved fingers
• Support control via the Wonder Wheel
• Cost $300-500

Basic units are available for under $200, but those lack Wonder Wheel integration and require the purchase of accessory mounts to integrate (poorly) with the Navigation Prep mount. One product stands out beyond others: Chigee’s AIO-5 series of smart displays. Chigee started as an Indigogo project, which successfully led to the launch of their “Lite” version. It’s really a feature-heavy version which includes a 5” display, front and rear facing cameras, blind spot monitoring, anti-theft sensors, and more. You can add tire pressure monitoring or a handlebar-mounted remote control. Wonder Wheel input is achieve through a CAN bus interface module.

It has been encouraging to see Chigee active in online forums supporting customers and listening to feedback. In fact, feedback has led them to announce two new products: the AIO-5 Play edition (less expensive version without cameras) and - most excitingly - the BMW edition. The latter will plug right into the BMW Navigation Prep mount, eliminating the need for any cabling or other installation steps. It will support the Wonder Wheel fully, the same way the Navigator VI and BMW Connected Ride Navigator do. Given Chigee’s pricing, I expect it to be about $300, or a third of BMW’s own device, when it launches in late July.

The Chigee BMW edition checks almost every box. Gloved fingers are probably the only missing thing. Even with capacitive glove fingertips, the 5” screen won’t be great for heavy gloves. This is where the Wonder Wheel support will hopefully shine: with jog-dial-like navigation and your hand safely on the handlebar, this device might be the perfect solution.

Even BMW’s own Motorcycle Owners’ Association (MOA) has taken notice. In the June 2024 issue of the BMW MOA Owners News magazine on page 30, James Carlisle favorably reviews the AIO-5 Lite system.

I’ll be first in line this July to order one of the AIO-5 Play for BMW units, and will review it here. From what I’ve seen, Chigee might be poised to solve BMW’s digital dilemma.