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Originally Posted by sq86
Yeah I agree with everything that you said. The engineering behind the steering geometry is really interesting to me. Car and Driver had a great article on it and how it could be improved on EPS (pretty easy to find if you search for it).
I'm just amazed that a company that advertised "the ultimate driving machine" would offer up a subpar EPS. I realize it's never going to be as good as a hydraulic system but they should be able to get it close. It makes me think they don't care about it as much. Much of it is algorithms and geometry so it should be easily "fixable."
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To be honest, the reason is that BMW and most other auto manufacturers long ago outsourced a ton of their component R&D to contractors like Bosch, Borg Warner, ZF, Getrag, GKN, etc.
This is why, most of the time, innovations appear across several manufacturers at once. The EPS is designed by Bosch. BMW can probably only tweak certain parameters. The firmware is probably written by Bosch employees to BMW requirements, just like the DME.
They are dealing with the limitations of the Bosch EPS system and what they were willing to pay for at the inception of the project. I'm not sure how Porsche does it better, but it's possible they just buy more expensive parts or have paid Bosch to do more work on the software.