Not just BMW. I've been watching (and enjoying) Mat Armstrong's youtube videos where he restores crash damaged luxury cars, one of them was a Lamborghini Revuelo. The car's battery was completely intact, but the safety fuse blew up in the BMS and despite replacing the entire module, the car wouldn't talk to the battery and wouldn't even start. Eventually he had to buy an entire 30K battery, and even then, the car wouldn't start because the car was so new Lamborghini themselves still didn't have the diagnostics tool to clear the crash code.
PHEVs are great, I've driven two in the past 6 years, but in most cases, you're one airbag deployment away from a very, costly repair and in 99% of cases, a totaled car.
Interestingly I’ve seen YouTubers replace the fuse in a Tesla for about £40 and a few hours of labour (it’s under the rear seats). Maybe something they’re doing right.
You can replace the fuse (not that easly) but for approximately the same price in a BMW. You do have to put in more work but the problem is with re-certifying the battery. Tesla does not care if the battery was damaged in the crash, they will (more or less) happily re-enable it. BMW decided that the only safe way is to re-certify the whole battery. I'm not saying it's the right decision, I think they over did it and VW does it better - but I do understand WHY they chose to do it so, and the WHY is not nearly as outrageous as a lot of people here think.
Ah that's interesting, IIRC in the video I'm thinking of they did get a 3rd party engineer to come out with a laptop and re-enable the battery in Tesla Toolbox, so that fits with what you're saying.
Yes mostly propaganda and being first/having a big driving base. They are notoriously closed/locked down from the diagnostic/reprogramming perspective.
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