[Nick.B]

'06 E90 330i, N52, RWD manual, with active steering.

Twice now, the active steering has shut down on the wife while making a left turn (the exact same left turn, interestingly). 2nd gear, clutch engaged. Steering wheel gets heavy, warnings on the dash and NAV but she manages to get it around the corner. A few seconds later the engine stops responding to the throttle, and the engine light comes on.

Clutch down, press the start button, engine starts and everything is fine. Warnings all gone, steering wheel centered when driving straight ahead.

I've checked codes in the DME, AL, CAS, FRM, DSC, nothing reported at the time of the shutdown. The one code in the active steering was about 2 years old based on the km reading. The DME had some recurring reports of crank sensor position plausibility.

The first time it happened was within a couple days of swapping her seats from an '08 in early October. It happened again yesterday. It's only been driven about 1000km between the two events, with 600 of them happening on Friday. The car sees a lot of very short trips so I try to take it for a good run when I have to go out of town. The passenger seat heating had not been working since the swap, and when checking that out yesterday I found one of the plugs to the seat heater module disconnected (oops!). The connector carries power and K_CAN signals to the module.

ISTA+ indicates the DME, AL and DSC connect to the JBE with PT_CAN and nothing else is on the bus, so an unterminated branch on the K_CAN should have no effect on the DME/AL.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

I'm thinking I might have to find/build a CAN logger to see what was on the wire at the time of the failure.

[Nick.B]

In hopes that someone with a similar problem stumbles upon this post:

I now believe that the steering was not the problem. I believe the problem was bad Vanos solenoid(s) causing poor running and stalling at warm idle. I can recall once or twice where it idled poorly, but then the next time it was fine.

We went out at some point, I drove. It was idling rough and shut down at several traffic lights. At our destination it did it again when I pushed the clutch in and steering into place, everything lit up on the dash the way she described. Codes suggested Vanos. I had cleaned them in previous years, but the codes kept coming back.

Two new NTK Vanos solenoids, engine idles perfect, no codes, no strange behaviour.

I think the fact that it happened at the same location to her several times was because on a cold start it idles high, and not until after a few minutes does the idle speed drop to the point where the slow Vanos would cause it to stall. It takes about the same time to warm up, and that left turn comes at about the same time after starting it up. I think it's just a failure of memory about the car being in 2nd with the clutch engaged. SO much happens so fast one may not remember exactly.