just wondering what you guys think of the navigation system in these cars....ive heard they arent really all that good...that its better to get a tomtom or something like that...the reason im asking is im about to buy a 740 and if the navi's suck then im just gonna buy one without it and buy my own navi...

I have a Mk III Navi computer in mine with widescreen and it's decent. It is pretty fast especially after burning in the latest firmware and the split screen display is nice. My only complaints are that it's not touch screen and, since it is CD-based, it doesn't have a lot of POIs stored.

For 97-98, I think the MK II is installed which doesn't support widescreen.

One option is to swap in a Mk IV which is DVD based and has more features like 3D, etc. MK IV is the current BMW Navi generation.

Others may pipe in with more experience with other Navi generations...

how much do you think it would cost to put that newer mkIV in??

I have a MkI. It's pretty good at what it does, just does it slowly. The POIs are pretty lacking, but for the most part I've only needed to use that feature like 2 times since I got the car in March 06. It totally sucked until I bought an up to date map cd though, so if you get it be sure to get a new map cd.

The MkIV computer runs about $400 on eBay. I don't think you NEED the widescreen to run the MkIV.

Oh, BTW, the Mk IV DVD does have CONUS rather than by Region as in the earlier Nav computer versions...

IMHO, i think the early navigations system blow in comparison to whats out there. I have a MKII in my recently acquired '00 E38, and one of the first things I'm going to do is update it to the MKIV, and then update the 4:3 screen to a 16:9 widescreen. The only thing stopping me from completely ditching it in favor of one of the touchscreen aftermarket ones is all the integrated crap that I'll lose the ability to control like all those OBC functions, along with steering wheel integration. I really miss the kenwood ddx systems that I put in my Supra after coming to this.

Yea, I almost wish my car had no nav to begin with so I could get a DIN unit and not know how nice it is having the OBC and stuff on the LCD heh.

Cumbersome.