A peculiar thing happened last week with the air conditioner in my 2004
330i (4-door, manual, with performance package). It happened while I was driving up the Grapevine. For those of you who don?t live in the Los Angeles basin (or travel to it from the North), the Grapevine is a very long, very steep hill (heading South on Interstate 5) that climbs into the Tehachapi mountains which separate the Los Angeles basin from the central valley. I don?t know exactly how long or how steep the Grapevine is, but it seems to go on forever. Trucks have a special lane where they can be seen creeping up the hill at what looks like about 10 mph. I was in either 4th or 5th gear moving at about 80 mph. The temperature was about 85 degrees. The engine was not laboring at all (why should it?), and I could have easily increased the speed if I had wanted to. What happened was that part-way up the hill, the air conditioning shut off. After I crested the top of the hill, the air conditioning turned back on. This behavior had never happened previously in this situation, nor have I experienced this with any previous 3-series BMW that I have owned. I would be interested to know if the engine electronics in the newer cars have some special mode where the air conditioning is shut down when it is sensed that the engine is having to work harder than usual (i.e., climbing a long steep hill).Lou D'Amario