shiny

I saw a 5er in the Bay the other day (not San Fran, Cardiff!) - BMW individual Germany calls the colour I saw "Diamante Metallic" - if this is the one you mean then it's lovely, like a pearly creamy silver. The car had parchment leather and black maple wood interior. Very nice!

Gray Dog

I see no reason why you cannot order a special color in the USA so long as it is a color that BMW offers. My understanding is that for a USA car you can order anything you can get in Europe so long as it is legal in the USA and you know the BMW order code. Having said all that, I special ordered a Dakar Yellow 2003 M3 from my dealer in Richmond, Virginia. I had know problems doing so other than paying the extra $2,000 cost (actually it was $1,800+ as my dealer gave it to me at cost), and my dealer was more than willing to order the car with the special color.

BTW Dakar Yellow looks great on a E46 M3 as you can see in the little picture in this response or in my alblum on the E60net. Both pictures feature my car next to the Phoenix Yellow M3.

rodybmw

Before I begin my pessemistic post on ordering non standard colors through BMW NA let me say this: I hope that you guys are able to get the Individual or other non standard BMW colors through BMW NA. Nothing would make me happier then to hear that BMW NA is finally starting to give us more choices. HAVING SAID THAT here's my experience with BMW NA and non standard colors:

In the past 11 years I have tried to order non US BMW colors on four BMW's and have not succeeded once, here's the list:

1. 1995 M3: BMW ALMOST let me order a standard BMW color not available in the US for $1300 after draging me along for almost 6 months (the key word here is "almost"). At the last minute before the order was finalized BMW AG temporarily suspended all special orders through BMW NA because they said that NA was not handling orders properly and was messing up people's orders. So I ended up with a standard Alpine white M3.

2. 1997 528i: BMW NA again refused a non US BMW color, but amazingly they did let me get the cloth interior which was not a standard US interior.

3. 2001 X5 3.0i: BMW NA did not let me order it in Gray Green Metallic, which was a standard X5 color for non US models which were being built in the same factory alongside the US models. Of coarse, they ended up adding that color as a standard color for the US X5.........a year AFTER we got our X5.

4. 2005 545i: BMW NA did not let me have Stratus Gray Metallic (an E63 color), and Truffle Brown Leather (a non US E60 interior color). They also did not let me change the wood trim to Aluminum.

Around the time that I was ordering my E60 my salesman also had a high profile Hollywood Studio boss as a client who tried to order a 760 in another BMW color and even he was turned down by BMW NA.

Appearently since the ordering system has been integrated in the new BMW network the dealers can't even specify a special color as all the choices are in a clickable drop down menu, and they can only choose from within the few colors that are in the dropdown list. On some BMW models you can get lucky and have one or two special colors available as a "Priority 1" option for a couple of thousand dollars, in which case those can be selected on the dealer's computer. But that is not really giving you the choice to choose any BMW color that you want, but instead an additional color of THEIR choosing. Also, for some reason it seems like many E46 M3 owners have succeded in ordering non standard colors. I don't know if this is an M thing or an E46 thing. I also don't think it will carry over to the E60, as I have not seen or heard from anyone on all the different E60 forums that has been able to order a non standard color (some have tried but they have been turned down by BMW NA).

Again, going back to my first paragraph, I hope that I am proven wrong and that you guys are successful in ordering special colors. I would be very happy to hear that BMW NA is letting people order other standard BMW colors on the E60, let alone BMW Individual colors.

By the way, one of the times that BMW NA turned me down for a non standard color their reason for doing so was that it was within the first year of the production of a model and they don't take any special orders within that time frame. If that is true then you may have better luck with the E60 as it is in it's third year or so.

If you are successful in doing this let us know the details on how you did it.

Good Luck

igor

I saw a 5er in the Bay the other day (not San Fran, Cardiff!) - BMW individual Germany calls the colour I saw "Diamante Metallic" - if this is the one you mean then it's lovely, like a pearly creamy silver. The car had parchment leather and black maple wood interior. Very nice!
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Diamant Metalis is a different colour. It has light purple/rosy hue and you can look at it on offical BMW web-siet in Individual colours configurator. Moonstone is not yet avalilable there. I would also like to have an idea how it wud look like. Normally conventional Moonstone is pearl/blue hue.