View Single Post
      10-09-2017, 10:08 PM   #4
keylime503
Major
630
Rep
1,227
Posts

Drives: M2C 6MT, Audi A4 Avant
Join Date: Dec 2014
Location: Bay Area, CA

iTrader: (0)

Day 1

Once again, I woke up far earlier than my alarm dictated ready to get an early start on this amazing day, but my travel partner was content to sleep as long as possible. When I finally convinced her to get up and get moving, we walked a block to the U-bahn station. The ticket machine required you to specify your destination zone and I couldn’t figure out on the map which zone the Welt station was so I went with Zone 2 (Munich central was Zone 1). Turns out almost the entire U-bahn system is in Zone 1, so a little money was lost there but oh well. Shout out to the Bank of America Travel Rewards card, basically the only U.S. credit card that supports Chip+Pin (as opposed to the traditional Chip+Signature) which is needed for European stations.



My excitement was quickly ramping up as we got closer to the Welt. Upon arrival, we took the elevators to the 3rd floor premium lounge where we were quickly and efficiently checked in. The lady offered to move our delivery up from the scheduled 10:00am to 9:20am which I accepted. I ended up being the first delivery of the day.

Others have written plenty about the Premium Lounge so I won’t go on about it too much. I’ll just say if you’re familiar with airline lounges in the U.S. (not International), it was about on par with that, albeit with an awesome view like this:





At 9:20am on the dot, we met Robert our delivery specialist. He took us down to the product display room, which was filled with these awesome 4K displays that the delivery specialists use to go over the features of the car. Robert was awesome, he quickly narrowed down my level of familiarity with the current F-chassis features and tailored the presentation to focus on aspects I was not familiar yet.



Finally it was time for the big event. We walked down the floating staircase, turned the corner, and there she was!



We spent about 30 minutes going over the car, which mostly consisted of learning all the new features of iDrive 5.0 which was new to me. When it was time to head out, we took 2 “victory laps” around the Welt before exiting outside. My first priority was to get the token shot of my car in front of the Welt, but surprisingly it took some amount of convincing to allow the valet guy to let me drive in front of the Welt sign. But it was worth it in end for this shot:



After that, we dropped the car off with the valet (complimentary for ED customers) and went for the factory tour. No photos were allowed as was expected, but I highly recommend this tour. The English-language tour is once a day at 11:45am. After the tour, we went to the BMW Museum across the street. To be honest, we were both underwhelmed but we’re also the kind of people who get bored with museums quickly. So in case you have to pick between the factory tour and the museum, I definitely recommend the factory tour.

By this time, it was 3pm and unfortunately Munich rush hour was starting to pick up. So my first ~30 minutes with my new M240i was spent mostly in 1st gear and I became familiar with the clutch travel very quickly. I chose today’s route to Fussen because it afforded the highest amount of unlimited-speed sections on the autobahn (see map of speed limits below), despite being about 20 minutes longer than the most direct route.





As for the part you all care about, yes the car was amazing and drove exactly as I expected. Coming from a base F32, the adaptive M suspension was something that was new to me. Despite the immaculate german pavement, I soon found that my optimal configuration was sport steering, sport throttle, and comfort chassis. I’ll have to play with the sport chassis more once the car is back home and I can play with it without worrying about the comfort of my passenger.





The most surprising part was the throttle burble when letting off the gas, it was far more pronounced than I expected in sport mode and it made any thoughts of getting the M performance exhaust go out the window. And yes, I got a chance to legally max out at 150mph:



In Fussen, we stayed at a small mansion-turned-BnB called Villa Toscana (~$110). It was comfortable, parking was plentiful, and the breakfast was the first of many amazing European breakfast spreads which I still miss to this day. It was about a 20 minutes walk from the main part of Fussen which we walked into for dinner. The proprietor recommended a fantastic Greek restaurant which was set up in the courtyard of an old castle, which ended up being the best meal we had during the entire trip by far.


Appreciate 1