I got my first BMW last week and since we had planned a visit to Berlin this was a great opportunity to try the car. I must admit we used it mainly for travelling to and from there, in the city the preferred mode of transport was public transport and bike!

First thing I noticed was that the car has a lot of functions through the iDrive. I'm not sure what to think of it. Some functions are a lot more logical in conventional solutions like buttons for TA (Traffic Announcement) on/off. The iDrive is also not programable enough to make it necessary to my humble opinion. It does work with my iPod touch but it's not possible to flick trough a big collection like on the iPod itself. The iDrive knob is too slow for that. But it works and it works well, including TA announcements while listening to the iPod.

It feels quite a bit bigger then my previous car which was a Jaguar X-type. I do need the PDC to get a feel of the size of the car.

It's an automatic (non sport) and I think this automatic is a magnificent piece of technology. The car is also fast enough for our country, with 163 HP (corporate version) it faster then most cars. On the German autobahn I had the chance to open it up a bit, not fully it only had 500 km or so on it. The car has a theoretical top speed of 229 km/h but we didn't go over 220 on the speedo which was fast enough for my wife as well We did cruise a while at 170 - 180 km/h and the car is amazingly stable at those speeds, way better then anything else I have ever driven. You can feel these cars were made for the high speeds of the Autobahn.

The standard seats are good, we didn't have any back ache after several hours of driving and standing in the traffic jams near Braunschweig. What I, and my wife too, noticed on the first was that the car has a tendency to roll a bit along an imaginary axle front to back. I noticed this too on the station wagon, I had for my test drive, but the sales rep thought it was maybe due too the different suspension on those, but it's the same on the sedan. Maybe it's because the car is RWD, we didn't notice it anymore the next day. The weather was very sunny and one thing that was also very noticeable was that the interior heats up pretty fast and you have to lower the temperature quite a bit to keep it cool inside. The car has the standard climate control and it does cool but maybe I'll ask the dealer to check this for me.

Last thing, this car is frugal! Wow, driving a round trip to Berlin (some 1400 km) the average fuel consumption is 7,2 l/100 km and that includes the before mentioned high speeds. Today while driving to work the average was no more then 6 l/100 km, which is pretty amazing for an automatic car of this size.

Do I think it could be improved, well I could think of some small improvements in the controls but driving, roadholding and seats are already very, very good.

So do I like it? YES!

Guus
PS Hope to take some pictures next weekend!

 

Congrats - and yes, you will appreciate this car day in day out..



No doubt about that: