BMW going Bluetooth

BMW is going for Bluetooth in a big way, announcing the other day that they'll be offering the wireless networking, um, protocol as a standard feature in almost all of their 2005 model year cars (so you can get all distracted making hands-free phone calls while driving). Won't include the 7 Series, which already has a cellphone built-in, and a few early production 3 Series cars, but should be standard on all 5 and 6 Series models, as well as the M3 Convertible and X5 4.8is.

[Igor Fedulov @ Dec 19th 2005 12:05AM]

During this summer vacation in Europe we rented a BMW 330d wagon in France and that car on top of navigation system had a bluetooth phone system. The PIN for pairing was in the glovebox compartment and after pairing my T610 with the bmw system it was working flawlessly. The best feature IMHO is that you can use steering wheel controls to browse trhough phone book entries and each entry shows up in that center dashboard screen instead of navigation view. This was in August of this year.

[james v @ Dec 19th 2005 12:05AM]

i wonder if this will now show up in MINIs like the ipod connector and the cd changers..mmm that'd be sweet.

-james

[tard @ Dec 19th 2005 12:05AM]

I test drove an acura TL this weekend that had bluetooth. Worked like the bmw 330d that the poster below described.

[Shriram @ Dec 19th 2005 12:05AM]

I own a '03 330Ci and the electronic accessories that are available really suck compared to the Acura TL's navigation and bluetooth features. BMW is still offering an antiquated non-bluetooth "startac" phone for a horrendous amount of money whereas bluetooth is standard on all TL's.. It's about time they did this but it's many years late, not to mention the navigation still isn't voice controlled or have as many features as Acura's.. :(