A Mini’s Infotainment System and the Joys of Aftermarket Car Parts

Although [Arkandas] disclaims any interest in being a ‘car guy’, this is somewhat ironic in light of the sheer amount of modding he has performed on a range of cars over the years, a recent misadventure involving a BMW Mini F56’s infotainment system replacement and some light ECU reprogramming included. What happened exactly is covered in a detailed breakdown in a blog post.

The old iDrive infotainment system in the Mini. (Credit: Arkandas)

One of the aspects that [Arkandas] disliked about this car was its iDrive infotainment system, itself a stripped-down version of the full-fat infotainment system in ‘real’ BMW cars, with a small screen and awkward UX. The idea was to replace this with a more full-featured modern system.

Since the infotainment system does hook into the car’s CAN buses and other systems it has to be compatible, of course. This took some research before ultimately a fancy €700 aftermarket replacement was ordered from a Chinese seller.

Long story short, the device was mostly compatible aside from a connector wired wrongly and creating a short. This was fixed, but then the loosely fitted display toppled off during a test drive and broke, so a replacement screen was ordered. This screen arrived without requisite factory programming, so [Arkandas] embarked on a long reverse-engineering session.

Before he was able to extract firmware from the broken display and flash it onto the new display he was offered a brand-new replacement for the whole device, which he accepted in return for sending the old unit back. Although this still left him with a range of questions, at least the new infotainment looks pretty spiffy.

The worst part about the whole experience was just how much waiting and agonizing over poor after-sale support was involved, along with all the things that can go wrong and turn a fun afternoon of fitting shiny new parts into a months-long ordeal. Since modern cars are basically just a stack of computers on wheels, this ensures that even ‘not car guys’ will be doing a lot more of such fun car modding.