[krhodes1]

I've done it twice. The first time we flew in that morning, so I scheduled the car pickup for late in the afternoon, 4pm, I think. Don't do that! Too stressful with worrying about the flights, and utterly exhausting. We drove to Stuttgart after the pickup. Got to the Welt at about 11:30am, which was plenty of time to see the Welt and tour the Museum before the pickup with a nice lunch in the lounge.

Second time, we flew in the day before and spent the night. I scheduled the car pickup for very first thing in the morning, 8:45am. Took an hour to do the pickup, then they valet parked the car for us. We did the factory tour, which takes a 2ish hours, then lunch and the museum. Left about 2pm, drove to King Ludwig's castles, toured around the mountains a bit, then drove to Stuttgart again. Also completely exhausting, but less stress about flights. Of course, I got minimal sleep the night before pickup due to the excitement of it all.

A couple interesting things differed between doing ED in 2011 and 2015. The first time, the car had just about enough gas in it to get to a gas station, the second time they gave a full tank, but made note that it was BMWUSA that was paying for that, not BMW! The first time we got a 10E voucher for the gift shop. The second time the voucher PLUS the personalized key chain that was the only thing you could actually buy for 10E! And they threw in safety vests for each person in the party. Also because I had ordered the H/K stereo, H/K was giving out a nice Bluetooth desk speaker.

If you are buying a car with NAV, it will not have the Europe maps loaded into the system, but rather maps on a special USB thumbdrive. You can't take it out! And there is no address info for most of Eastern Europe. You can still enter addresses by GPS or by moving the cursor. Luckily, I already knew my way around Budapest well enough! Don't forget to take that thumbdrive out when you drop the car off. Also, I was exceedingly annoyed that the delivery center removed the brackets for the warning triangle from the trunk lid. My dealership ordered replacements for me gratis though.

If you are into cars other than BMWs, I highly recommend driving over to Stuttgart (a nice couple hours on the autobahn) and touring the Porsche and Mercedes Benz museums. The Porsche museum is small, do that in the morning, have lunch, then spend the afternoon at the MASSIVE MB museum.