[Cincinnatus]

Howdy, folks.

I may have asked this a while back, but I'm wondering if any of you can offer an opinion on the 'dangers' of re-flashing the car firmware to reset it to factory defaults, more or less the same way you would with a cellphone.

What tipped me off is that I've made a few attempts with Carly to code the sport and HP/Torque displays show, but they're not functional. In other words, the dials show, but they don't move... the sport mode window appears with the green highlighting, but nothing can be selected or changed. Because I'm the second owner of the car, I have no idea what was done previously that might be causing this.

It was suggested that resetting the factory firmware would set the car to a clean 'default' status and might purge any "ghosts in the machine" since the BMW software can, at times, be buggy.

However, I was warned by the dealer that any time that sort of coding is attempted represents a risk to the other modules in the car, and that things can go "big bad" and replacing modules can cost up to thousands if an attempt borks any of them.

So, do you guys think this concern is overstated? Is it possible the dealership is just looking to avoid a low-profit service? Or is there really a potential issue?