A couple of weeks ago, I completed 1 year of owning this car. In this year, I drove about 18,000km.
In summary, it has been a lovely car to own. I enjoyed every single moment with the car. The city traffic is not the ideal playground for this car (although it is still very comfortable to drive this in the traffic - which often means just crawling smoothly without any accelerator input). But it is on the highways where the car is just brilliant. It loves open roads. The highway drives have become absolute joy because of this car. The handling is perfect for the highways, the ride quality is just optimal, and the engine is damn good while cruising on the highways. The 400Nm of torque ensures the engine is never dull even at low cruising RPMs. And the little bit of the roughness which the engine has while idling or crawling through the traffic vanishes at highway speeds. The engine is creamy smooth at 2000RPM. A slight tap on the accelerator and the car joyfully pulls forward from any speed. A more than a slight tap on the accelerator, and even more fun begins. You can actually pull it very fast even when already doing very good speeds. And if there is a sweeping corner of the highway around while doing this, you are in for experiencing the "sheer driving pleasure". I absolutely love all those sweeping corners of my regular highways now.
There have been a few minor negatives too. The LED headlamps somehow confuse me. As discussed in a few posts above, once adjusted well, the headlamps perform well and many times I had good experiences with those. But sometimes it feels like the lamps are totally weak or the adjustment is off. Overall it is a very inconsistent experience with the LED headlights. I still have to figure out this mystery. And I still hate the lack of boot space. The space saver eats a significant space and on more than one occasion we felt shortage of boot space when carrying a couple of mid-size bags on long highway drives.
Cleaning and detailing: I never gave a bucket wash to this car. I will never do that. I wash the car once a month (or on rare occasions twice if really necessary) with a high pressure wash at a detailing shop. Other than that, I use a Jopasu duster whenever required. The red color looks brilliant when clean, but it also shows the dirt very clearly. The car often looks dirty a day after I wash the car. It is not at all easy to keep this car looking clean. At times I have just driven around with dirty car.
Talking about pressure wash, my favorite place for car wash is "Feynlab" in HSR Layout, which is one of the best car cleaning and detailing studios in Bangalore. I discovered this place when it had opened brand new, and since then, most of my team-bhp friends in Bangalore bring their cars here. I highly recommend this place for anyone to get their car washed in Bangalore.
One of those "clean" moments. The car at Feynlab after washing:
A "beauty shot" at Feynlab, after a through cleaning:
And some photographic effect to highlight "the eyes" :-):
BWW Advanced Eye 2.0 (BMW dashcam): Meanwhile, some four months ago, I got this BMW Advanced Eye 2.0 installed. It is BMW's official accessory and specifically designed for BMW cars, and integrates seamlessly with the car electronics. Just like most of the BMW official accessories, this is very expensive for what it is. I paid Rs. 46k (under some discount scheme, otherwise the MRP is even higher) for this, and still keep wondering why it is so expensive. Of course, being the OEM accessory with complete integration with BMW is big part of the price, and I am fine with that.
The dashcam comes with an Android and iPhone app, and the app can connect to the dashcam by WiFi.
The box of the dashcam:
This is how it looks on the front:
And on the rear:
And this it how it looks from inside:
Notice the rear dashcam coming in the middle of the IRVM, which is pretty bad and annoying till you get used to it:
The cameras are clearly visible from the outside in clean showrooms (as seen in the above pictures). However, it real-world conditions, with a little bit of dust on the windscreens, and the light reflections, it is not easy to spot the camera from outside. The below pictures taken in bright and dusty conditions show what I mean:
Overall, I have a mixed opinion about this. I still don't think the price is justified, and it has several shortcomings/bugs. The main pros and cons are as follows:
Pros: - OEM accessory fitted by the dealer, and seamless integration with the car electronics - for example, the device operates differently in various combinations of engine ON/OFF status and car battery status. The device will reduce its functionality or switch off completely if the battery it too low while in parked mode.
- Being OEM accessory, it is "hard wired" and the wiring is well concealed. Being hard-wired, the operation is fully automatic and in sync with the car engine status. I don't even need to remember the dashcam is there. There is zero manual intervention required.
- Parking mode is cool. Based on radar and accelerometers, the recording starts in "parking mode" if someone comes too close to the car or if there are any movements detected around the car. Similarly, if someone touches the car, the recording will start too.
- There is no display on the inside. Thus, it is quite inconspicuous from inside. I don't like the dashcams with display inside, as I think that is very distracting, especially in the nights. This one is quite simple and clean from inside. Zero distraction to the driver. The unit hides behind the IRVM as seen from the driver's seat.
- It has a supercapacitor instead of a battery (thus no fears of heat related problems that batteries could suffer from).
- The WiFi connectivity is very useful for quickly watching the videos on the phone, and for the phone app to connect to the dashcam and change settings etc.
Cons:- There are several serious software bugs. For example, the time stamp on the videos is often wrong. It is off by 30 minutes. Seems like the device has a trouble remembering Indian Time Zone (+5:30), and it resets to either +5 or +6 randomly. Only when the phone is specifically connected to the device and the phone app is up and running and connected to the camera it gets the correct tine zone. All other times it gets wrong time zone. This is really a serious bug. It is impractical to connect the phone app all the time and keep it running to get the correct time zone.
- The picture quality is about average. Many Rs. 15k dashcams will have a much better picture quality.
- The phone app is great for watching the videos quickly. However, those videos can't be transferred out of the app. There is no way to share or send those videos out, and those files can't be read by anything other than this specific app. This severely limits the usefulness of the app and the WiFi function. For all practical purposes, you still need to pull out the SD card and copy the files out manually for using them on any other device like your laptop.
- Given these limitations, the price feels ever more crazy. This one is one of the most crazily overpriced piece of electronics that I have ever bought.
Miscellaneous photo-shoots and drives: Throughout the year, I did many drives - a few solo drives, many team-bhp drives, and many photoshoots with close friends and their cars. The car loves open highways and it loves company. Every single of those drives was a joy and every single photoshoot was a memorable one. Sharing here some random samples:
"The Beauty and The Best". With bhpian
KarthikK's red Thar:
With
Robimahanta's beautiful 328 during a random photoshoot:
Some solo shots at that photoshoot location:
During the "Kolli Hills Drive", (
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-...ml#post4608997 (Team-BHP Meet @ Kolli Hills : 22nd & 23rd June, 2019)), parked next to
RSUDARSANAN's 320d:
With
Fortified's Mercedes C250d:
A face-off with
Graaja's 330i GT:
And a random solo shot at Kolli Hills:
Pure and Innocent Joy: Through the year of driving it around, one thing I experienced repeatedly is that the kids love the car. Maybe it reminds them of their own favorite red car in their toy set. Even the kid inside me thinks the same. This is my favorite toy car that has come out alive and become real now. Of course, I would have loved it to have the inline six cylinder petrol engine that BMW is (
was?) famous for; but the kid inside me pretends to ignore this and nevertheless loves the red toy.
On that note, to conclude this update, here is a photo from the recent Kolli Hills drive, where three bhpian kids (including one grown-up kid - my friend and bhpian
abirnale) posing joyfully with the car: