Well I drove my car to work today in this great mid-west snow storm.. Lucky for me I have nice set of Nokian Hakkapalitas and plenty of ice racing and rally snow miles under my belt... The car is GREAT with the DSC off, but my window/door may have froze before i completed my trip... My driver door wont open from inside or out... I think the issue is that the window wont advance down at all when you grab the handle and so wont allow you to open the door... Is this a normal issue? I unplugged the battery just to see if that would help and it didnt...


Regards
LP

 

same thing happened to me today. got to work, had to get out the passenger side. I don't know if its a window problem because I know i've opened it before without the window notching down.

 

Try giving the outside door handle a firm smack with a fist. Not hard enough to damage anything, but a fairly firm thump.

If that doesn't work, try pouring some warm water down the window, just above the handle. The cable and/or mechanism might have frozen on you.

There's plenty of threads about this R50/52/53 problem.

 

check the fuses my dad's bmw had that problem with all doors! so we just checked the fuses and there was one that didnt worked we replaced it and all doors worked back to normal after a while.

 

Common problem in cold weather. A hair dryer aimed at the handle also works wonders

 

Must be a planned obsolescence thing...

Mine did the same thing tonight. It's an 02 (#166) with 162k on it, and I bought it new. Never happened in 6 winters. Went to a store, in there mayb e 10 min, came out and it wouldn't open. About 15 degrees here and snowing like hell.

I'll try the hair dryer tomorrow.

-Jim

 

check the fuses belive mee

 

Sometimes water seeps inside the door handles and freezes causing it to become a tighter seal/space. When you squeeze the door handles to open the door, and close the door behind you, what you may not realize is the door handle is still stuck and didn't pop out. That can cause the door not to open from the inside.

 

I have yet to take my door panel off to see exactly what's going on...but the strange thing on my car - the door handle doesn't normally get stuck on my car. It simply looses tension, like it (or the cable attaching to it) became disconnected. When this happens, the inner door handle ceases to work too. The black piece of the handle usually pushes in just fine, and springs back out like it should.

Normally a good smack or two, on the outer door handle is enough to get things working again - even if I'm trapped inside. That's assuming I can still roll the windows down.

Unfortunately, I'm never near an electrical outlet to try the hair dryer thing. Would be much easier than pouring warm water down the window channel, and possibly dry things out enough to keep this from happening again for a while...

 

Found this info: https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...-bulliten.html. Don't know if this is weather related.

 

Give it a firm smack just behind the door handle inside of the car and the window starts working...i would know, its my old car . How is everything else running?

 

With my Mini r50 2003 problem was opening cable sleeve coming detached from its detachment near latch mechanism inside the door, just behind the latch itself.

Since door won't open from outside of inside, had to use flat crowbar-like upholstery tool and pry doorpanel open from the bottom. Loud pops are retaining studs popping out like they should. Then I was able to open the doorpanel a bit and reach the cable by feel and pull it. Ta-dah, door opens!

Actual fix was simply to detach cable fully and reinstall, since the problem was sleeve pulling too deep into holder. You need to loosen the cable attachment torx screw so that cable Holder turns a bit, attach cable and put everything back together.

Old chain, but I hope this helps others with same problem.

 

With my r50 2003 problem was opening cable sleeve coming detached from its detachment near latch mechanism inside the door, just behind the latch itself.

Edit: had to remove seat before getting to door panel, since there is no room to operate otherwise. DONT turn ignition on while doing this, because SRS-module thinks there is airbag problem and you get persistant errorlight to deal with.

Since door won't open from outside of inside, had to use flat crowbar-like upholstery tool and pry doorpanel open from the bottom. Loud pops are retaining studs popping out like they should. Then I was able to open the doorpanel a bit and reach the cable by feel and pull it. Ta-dah, door opens!

Actual fix was simply to detach cable fully and reinstall, since the problem was sleeve pulling too deep into holder. You need to loosen the cable attachment torx screw so that cable Holder turns a bit, attach cable and put everything back together.

Old chain, but I hope this helps others with same problem.