BMW BLOG

Here is the answer.

The time is around 19:00 hours on a cold, blustery winter night. The temperature is hovering around -1 and it has been raining, a dangerous stage for icy conditions. Having left the shop with 4 new winter tires installed only that morning, what I encountered next had me kissing all four corners of my contact patch.

Traveling South bound on Windsor’s Huron Church Ave, one of North America’s busiest roads with high truck traffic, I came upon an intersection where the two right lanes of the 3 Southbound lanes were at a stand still, tens of semi trucks lumbering through first gear. With a fresh green displayed, I approach the intersection just below the speed limit, a clear lane lies ahead. With no warning or signal, a flat-bed semi-truck makes a sudden move pulling into my lane from stand-still (trucks are altogether banned from this “fast” lane on Huron Church, I guess he’s a new, careless, or drunk driver).
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In the next few sentences, we will describe how the keyless entry technology works in a BMW and how to disengage the ignition in case of emergency.

BMW uses a ‘throttle-by-wire’, like a lot of other manufacturers, the gas pedal is no longer mechanically connected to a throttle butterfly. It basically is used as an input device to the engine management software that controls fuel and air settings for the engine. But given the recent spate of problems facing one manufacturer and unintended acceleration it might be good to know what to do if a ghost gets in the machine.

On BMWs with the Engine Start/Stop button, you hit the button repeatedly while underway to shut down the engine (about three times – stop pressing it when the engine shuts down). It was one of the first things I learned to do when I got my BMW.

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It has been a while since we posted some BMW tips and trick, so we decided to to renew that tradition and make it an habit. Of course, we can’t do this without your help, so with this occasion,  we extend an invitation to all of you that would like to email us some tips, tricks or fixes for our lovely bimmers.

Today, we’re going to show you how to reset your BMW inspection light that shows up on your cluster when you’re bimmer is due for Service Maintenance. One of our friends owns a 325i and he tends to change his oil at different shops who don’t own a BMW reset tool.

Without a doubt, many of you already know this, but for the others that are still new to the BMW world or simply never had to manually reset their light, this might come handy.

BMW Service Indicator Lights Reset

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Having purchased two new BMWs myself, I have been in situations where I looked up several resources on how to track my new BMW from its early ordering stages, to production status, ship tracking and all the way to being loaded on the transport truck.

The process can be quite obsessive, but truth is that I had tremendous fun seeing the car going through all these stages. Just to give you an example how obsessive this can be, I will just mention the fact that I have been tracking even the vessel that my car was loaded on and every day I would follow its course and ….even looked up weather reports on the sea to determine if there will be any delays. YES, I am that big of a BMW enthusiast.

Now what I haven’t done was to setup a complete obsessive exciting guide that will provide all the resources needed to track your newly ordered BMW. But, another BMW fan and owner comes to my rescue and provides, by far, THE MOST COMPLETE guide I have ever seen and believe me, I have seen quite a few on several BMW forums.

Jeff G. truly is an enthusiast and you will see from his BMW Ordering Guide below; I can only imagine how much time it took to dig out all these resources and then even more, to put them all together for the BMW community.

So, sit back, take notes, bookmark the page, share it with others, print it out, Tweet it, Digg it, whatever you need to do because this article will remain as one of the most important and useful articles ever posted by us. I have no doubt that you will learn a lot from his experience; I know I did, even though I thought I knew it all.

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This is a topic that came up in many of the debates I had with my friends or other car fans. As many of you know, BMW is one of the few companies left to offer a Car Free Maintenance Program for any vehicles still under the original factory warranty. In a recent article, we spoke about the options you have when your BMW warranty expires, but that’s a whole different story and you can read upon it.

Before we go ahead and compare some of the maintenance programs offered by other luxury brands, allow me to express my opinion on this. As I have always told my friends, one of the many reasons why I chose a BMW was the Free Maintenance Program which made me more comfortable that all the scheduled maintenance and not only, would be taken care of, without extra charges on my end. With maintenance part of the initial car warranty (Get a FREE, No Obligation, Extended Auto Warranty Quote in Less than a Minute!), all I have to worry about is making the monthly payments.

BMW calls its maintenance plan “BMW Ultimate Service” which goes for the first 4 years of ownership, or the first 50,000 miles.

Now, let’s see who are the contestants this time around: the long-time competitor, Mercedes-Benz, the runner up Audi and the  king of car luxury sales in the U.S, Lexus.

Even thought Mercedes was one of the first to offer a free maintenance plan, back in 2005, they decided to eliminate their free maintenance and offer their customers the option to choose from a variety of prepaid plans.

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Leasing a car has become more and more popular over the years and implicitly, swapping car leases numbers are growing as well. These days, most of the luxury vehicles are being leased, with BMW being one of the leaders. In a conversation with several BMW dealerships, in state of Illinois, there were between 60-70% BMWs leased.

The average lease period is two years, but seeking a lower monthly payment, many car buyers are going for three or even four years auto leases. Now, if you’re just like me and would like to have a new car every two years, you might have a problem. Car dealerships, banks or any financial institution will not take back your car, so you’re left with very few options, swap your car lease or traded it for another one.

How does it work really?

The process itself is less complicated than many people assume, with the other party taking over the car and assuming responsibility for the remaining monthly payments. And the most important thing, there are no penalties from your lender and most of the swap car lease companies charge a small fee, $500 being the standard.

Now, what’s the hardest part?

As you might have guessed, the hard part is to find a person that is looking to take over a car lease for a short term. Sure, word of mouth always worked and still works, but it can be lengthy process.

Thankfully, in the past few years, many swap car lease companies have been founded, two of them becoming the leaders in their field: Swapalease.com
and LeaseTrader.com

Continued….

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Last week, our article on why should you have run-flat tires on your BMW stirred controversy among the bimmer fans and owners. As promised, I am back with the second part of the article in which we will expose the advantages of having REGULAR tires on your BMW. Together with Randy and Lance, two of our readers, we put together an interesting list of why one shouldn’t get the run-flat tires and the reasoning behind it.

One of the advantages of run-flat tires is the ability to drive 150 miles on them at 50 miles an hour. One might argue how convenient this solution really is especially if you’re out of town on a trip and desperately looking for a repair show. Having a run-flat go bad could cause further problems, especially finding a shop that can handle mounting these tires within 150 miles and having a suitable replacement tire in stock.

With the full-size spares BMW used to offer, getting a flat was a 25-minute pause, after which you could go on with your trip. On top of this, you could drive at full speed, with unlimited mileage and worry about the flat when  you reach the final destination.

Here are some disadvantages of using run-flat tires, cons that turn into pros of using a regular tire:

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Let me start first by saying that this a “touchy” subject and it has been debated over and over again. While there are many people that love the run-flat tires on their BMWs, there are plenty of others that are absolutely against them and consider the normal tires as being a better choice for their cars.

The purpose of this article is to show you BMW’s point of view or the reasons behind using run-flat tires on most of their models. So, I will let them tell us the advantages of using them, but I will have an article ready with the cons as well.

The following text was published on babybmw.net, an UK fans forum, in response to a customer’s concern.

Quote:

BMW aims to provide our customers with a premium product that provides ultimate safety with optimum performance and it is always a concern to receive feedback of this nature.

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