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by aunty_helen 1565 days ago
Reminds me of my 2008 bmw 3 series, one night in the hills, taking the twistes at speed, I hit a pothole in the road. This mechanical force caused a misread on one of the two redundant throttle position sensors in the accelerator pedal.

As a safety feature the car went into limp mode, limited it’s rpm and performance to less than about 40% of power and threw all the Christmas lights it could at the dash, error codes and idrive warnings.

I limped the car home and did a fault code reset from my laptop with the pirated bmw dealer software via a bluetooth-obdc2 dongle and it was fine after that.

Of course the problem continued under strenuous driving conditions. I could’ve replaced the pedal assembly but meh, it was always a good reminder to back off a bit in my 1800kg car.

1 comments

Fairly common issue. My (same year) 335 pops for knock sensor a couple times a year. Turn the car off, tap the sensors on the side of the block with a screwdriver a few times, clear the code and you're good to go.

It's a running joke on BMW forums, if someone throws that code most responses ask if they were driving fast and hit a pothole since that's a pretty consistent trigger.

Heh this was the 335d, so a nock sensor would’ve definitely been throwing fault codes if it had one ;)

There was often a combination of about 3-4 errors that would occur when it went into limp mode. To this day I’m not actually sure if replacing the pedal would’ve fixed it and I think off memory, it was a 220$ experiment to find out.

(On another note, make sure you’ve got the gearbox upgrade software if you haven’t already)