I've got a 1991 BMW 525i which has done 253,000 km. It's been a good car but, the instrument panel on the dashboard has gone silly over the past couple of weeks.
When I first start the car in the morning, nothing works - i.e. no fuel gauge, temperature gauge, no vacuum gauge, no speedo, no tach.
I drive for about 1 km and the euel, temperature and vacuum gauges start to flicker like crazy. Affter about 1 to 2 km they all start to work properly.
Then at about 2-3 km the speedo and tach go crazy. Sometimes they eventually settle down and work properly and sometimes at roughly 80-100 km they indicate I'm doing 20km per hour at 500 revs.
Sometimes when they've been doing this, if I stop the car and go to shops or whatever and return say 15 minutes later, everything works perfectly.
Sometimes, if start it on a hot afternoon, everything might work perfectly after about 500 metres or just go through its silly cycle all over again.
Any ideas and, will it likely be expensive to fix?

Colin, August 2009

I have had problems with missing pixels on a bmw 5 series x5 gradually the pixels disappeared but after reading a forum saw a highly recomended company called www.cartronix.co.uk tel 07970 075414, who were able to repair it for me at a fraction of the cost of a new one, all the mileage remained unaltered and the unit didnt need reprogramming back to the car, hope this helps anyone with similar problems

tonytibbs, April 2010

I believe this sytem has its own power supply box under the dash that can cause this .......

bg, August 2009