I've always bought the factory service manuals for any car I've ever bought. It often costs multiple 100's of smackers, but it's always been money well spent as I hold on to my vehicles for a loooong time (still have an 83 mustang I bought new). When we picked up my wife's 2009 clubman, the search for a factory manual began.

The car came with the "Bentley manual" everyone seems to reference to. I gave it a once over and while it's pretty good, it lacks details and certain procedures I'm used to getting in a manufactures publication. Other than being hard bound, it's pretty close to what you get with Haynes or Chiltons. I was once a certified mechanic, then and aircraft maintenance engineer and ended as a flight engineer. So I'm used to very detailed technical publications and anything "simplified for public consumption" just doesn't give me the detail I want when troubleshooting, repairing, etc.

Fishing around on the internet revealed BMW went to online subscriptions many years ago, like the NA OEM's have gone to recently. I checked the BMW technical site for subscription prices and sure enough, the cost for access reflect that they really only want shops/businesses/etc to have access. Or a private citizen with deep deep pockets......

I found a few references to a "newTIS" website, but they have apparently been shut down by BMW in favor of their own commercial site (and aforementioned fees).

I figured I'd give one of those downloads off the big auction site a go. For ten bucks it was worth a try. The legal aspects I'll leave to the individual to make a decision on, although the auctions I looked at all stated they were legally distributing the material (ummmm, yeaaaaahhhh......right). Tried one that seemed to have the right index pictures of the material and stated they were an "authorized" BMW dealership in the UK. When downloaded.....disappointment. I won't say they didn't give me what they described, but it was kind of a mess. It was a pdf file, no indexing or functioning internal links and was just one big long document. It might have been a TIS download (possibly the newTIS site?), but the quality was pretty sketchy. Readable, but that's as far as I would go with calling it usable. It also did cover the model years it stated, although the actual pdf file only covered up to model year 2007 and up to 2010 was just poorly scanned paper copies of updates for each model year after 2007. As I said; disappointing but not a lot of wallet pain at ten bucks.

So i was still at the point of the Bentley manual being my best option.

I figured I'd give it one more try and quit if it was another bust. I won't link to the auction nor give the seller name, people can do their own search and make their own decision on "copyright infringement". I'm not here to play copyright police nor point anyone to a possible violation of it.

So another search turned up a promising auction. Again, pictures and the description looked right. File size was huge compared to the other one I tried. Supposedly covered up to 2017. This was 20 bucks, so I wasn't holding out hope for anything much better than the first try. Similar claims were made to the first file I tried; UK BMW dealer, legally distributing, etc, etc, etc. So I really expected to be paying 20 bucks for essentially the same as the first file.

Kissed 20 bucks good-bye and got the download link, not expecting much and assured myself this was the last time I'd try.

15.8 GB download...Yipes!

It did include a boatload of the BMW number series cars as well, so the large file size kind of made sense. Still wasn't holding out much hope of getting anything better than the first attempt at 10 bucks.

I had to load it into a virtual machine as it wouldn't run native on windows 10. I've already got a virtual machine loaded on a dedicated car software laptop (I used to tune diesels, OBD1, OBD2, etc so I have dedicated hardware for tuning) so it wasn't a big deal for me. Once booted up, I was greeted by what looks like a BMW TIS site, running in a virtual machine:



It even looked up my car by vin and had all the details on it (IE: model, options, engine, build date and procedures/parts lists by VIN). Browsed it through and it's waaaay more complete that the Bentley manual, which is what I need. Links all worked, indexed and all. Looks pretty much like what I was used to for interactive manuals when I worked in aerospace (retired) and pretty much the same as the Ford inline manuals I used to have a subscription to (I also have a 2016 F-150 Lariat).

So, they are out there, you just have to find them.

As mentioned I'm not here to play copyright police, so the legal decisions I leave to the individual and whether or not if they want to believe the sellers claims of being "authorized".