Note to self: do not move to Illinois. Emissions for me is a visual check.

And Times today says your state is really broke too!

 

This is great information, thanks for posting. I had never seen the hard info for how to get the monitors to reset.

You do not have to do these things in order afaik. Sometime it can be a real pain. Keep at it!

 

it says it will be discontinued if it senses large fluctuation in throttle angle? so you can't switch gears in a manual trans car...? this requires throttle to be set to zero then reset to accelerate in the new gear.
do you understand what i'm saying?

 

Pretty sure that would refer to something like 0-100% signal, rapidly. Obviously, you can shift.

 

Hopefully this works for me. Thanks for the post.

 

Here is the drive cycle info in an attachment if anyone needs it to download easily.

Just drive the car normally, the Evap is usually the last and hardest item to clear. If the O2 sensors are bad or connected backwards it will play hell in clearing a lot of the Readiness Monitors. Also you may have codes or problems that keep the Readiness Monitors from setting, you will need a better tool like PA Soft BMW Scanner 1.4.0 in order to see what is really going on.

Also some states will allow up to 2 Readiness Monitors not clear but with no CEL and you can still pass inspection.

Only some scan tools show Readiness Monitor Status.

 

I realize that this thread is ten years old, but since it was the first one that popped up when I googled "E46 M3 drive cycle", I decided to post my experience here. Thank you for all the valuable info, @jfoj!!!

• TL;DR
  • If you already have an OBD dongle, use it with OBD Fusion or a similar app
  • Try jfoj's drive cycle: Catalyst not ready; could use some help understanding...
  • If the monitors are still not ready, invest in an OBD dongle and app
  • Clear trouble codes, eg, OBD Fusion>Diagnostics>Menu>Clear Trouble Codes
  • Attempt jfoj's drive cycle again
• When I took my E46 M3 in for a smog check, the catalyst and O2 sensor monitors were not ready because the battery had died recently. The smog check tech suggested that I google "drive cycle E46 M3", which is how I found this thread and the chart posted by the OP.
• I drove the suggested cycle several times, with varying degrees of compliance to the chart. The toughest part for me was driving between 40 and 60 mph for 15 minutes. Whenever I thought I had succeeded in completing the drive cycle, I took the car to the smog shop to read the monitors. They kept reporting that both the cat and O2 sensor monitors were still not ready. During my last visit, the tech mentioned that he saw a DTC when he read the monitors, and the DTC may be preventing the monitors from transitioning to ready.
• I made an appointment with an independent BMW shop to figure out whether the DTC was causing the problem. However, I wanted to fix this myself if possible so I did more research and found this thread: Catalyst not ready; could use some help understanding...
• I installed an LELink dongle on the car, bought OBD Fusion, and started gathering data. The O2 sensor logs looked fine to my untrained eye, and I could not figure out why the monitors were still not ready.
• At this point, I came up with three options: keep my appointment with the BMW shop, try a different brand of gas, or reset the monitors. I decided to reset the monitors. The next morning, I followed jfoj's drive cycle and all the monitors except the evap system's were ready in less than 15 minutes!
• California does not require the evap system monitor, so I am looking forward to getting the car smogged and registered again.