With more people beginning to venture out as the stay-at-home restrictions are relaxed, some of their vehicles are experiencing the detrimental effects of prolonged sitting. One of the most obvious and common is a weakened battery. While we’ve seen a lot of no-starts from completely dead batteries, the first sign can often be a long, or slow, crank on startup.
Newer BMWs have large batteries because of the extensive electrical systems present in modern cars. The plethora of safety, monitoring, and control systems that need to be maintained at constant voltage are significant. As a result, we refer to them as “rolling computer networks”.
When a battery weakens, it cannot fulfill its function of maintaining a stable power supply to all of these electrical systems, so they begin to shut down. This can go from the annoying, deleting the functionality of convenience features like the clock, to the expensively catastrophic, cutting power to the electric water pump that provides post-shutdown cooling to the turbochargers.
The newer the car, the more critical a healthy battery is to its many functions. Prolonged disuse, as well as very short trips that don’t allow the alternator to recharge the battery, are both deadly.
Should you experience any of these indicators of a weakened battery, give us a call and let the Friendly Professionals at Pacific Motorsports determine precisely what is happening. We’ve seen a lot, after all, we’ve been servicing BMWs and MINIs since 1996.