BMW BLOG

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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What is DSC

DSC, short for Dynamic Stability Control is a suspension control system which goes beyond the single components of ABS, Cornering Brake Control (CBC) and Automatic Stability Control. It works by monitoring each wheel speed individually along with yaw rate and longitudinal and lateral acceleration through various sensor.

The DSC module also receives information from vehicle speed and engine speed, throttle position, brake pedal position/force and the steering angle sensor. All of this information collected is fed to the DSC control module and process.

Photo Source: eBay

The DSC computer constantly calculates an ideal driving condition that is compared with the current status. If the vehicle oversteers or understeers, the calculated ideal deviates from the measured status, and DSC will intervene within a few milliseconds via the engine management system by either applying brakes at different wheels, cutting fuel, and a few other methods that are too detailed for this short presentation

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How many of you have been facing this decision: leather vs leatherette in your BMW.  I have always been debating between the two options, or most recently, cloth. Each time, I ended up choosing leatherette before leather due to several factors: cheaper, I was leasing the car for two or three years and last, my significant other, is against leather products.

But before we go into the pros and cons of the two interior options, I want to let you know that we will not turn this conversation into an ethical one and an animal welfare topic. I completely understand everyone’s point of view, but this article is not about that.

Leather

Advantages

• a higher resale value for your car
• it “breathes” better
• it becomes softer as time goes by
• it’s a clear indication of luxury in a car
• a unique smell, pleasant for many
• more color options and types of leather

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A few weeks ago, I started a series of articles on the auto leasing programs and various ways to calculate a lease payment. I also talked about the auto leasing vocabulary which, based on your feedback, it was very useful.

Today, I would like to give you some quick tips on how to negotiate the right lease and a lower monthly payment. Our final article in this car leasing series, will teach you how to negotiate the best price at your dealers, techniques and resources used.

Never put money down (known as “Capitalized Cost Reduction”) is not gospel, just generally good advice. In a lease, BMW Financial Services is actually buying the car for you, you’re just renting your BMW from them.

If you do a Capitalized Cost Reduction(CCR) and let’s say, several days later you will total your car in an accident, all that money from your insurance company goes to BMW Financial Services, so all the down payment you placed on your lease, it’s GONE, you won’t be able to get it back.

You have a few options to reduce your monthly payments. CCR is one of them, but there are others as well:

• The obvious and oldest technique - negotiate a lower purchase price
• Don’t load your cars with all the options available, prioritize and think about the fact that you will give back the car in 2-3 years (well, most of us will)
• Negotiate down the Money Factor, which is your interest.  Even though you’re not actually buying the car you’re negotiating the price BMWFS will pay for it and the interest they will charge. The difference between this purchase price and the (residual x interest) + tax is what determines your monthly payment so you want to do everything you can to get the purchase price and money factor down. Think of a car lease as a regular purchase: negotiate the final price before you talk about payment options.
• Another option with BMW is called Multiple Security Deposits (MSD). If you’re a new buyer you’ll have to pay one security deposits, but under MSD you can make up to seven more. .

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We’re continuing our new series of “How-To” articles and today, we’re going to teach you the basics of changing the oil in your BMW, a simple DIY guide. Changing the oil of a BMW is quite simple and not much different to any other car. Forgetting to change your oil regularly may cause sludge to build up, reduce power and most important, damage your engine.

Some BMW use synthetic oils while others organic, but many BMW technicians recommend the synthetic oil due to several benefits: friction reduction - a reduction in engine wear, and it also helps improve fuel economy. Every 15,000 miles, BMW takes care of the service maintenance, but based on your driving habits, the display on your dashboard will announce you if the oil needs to be changed earlier. From my experience, 10,000 miles is the average for many BMWs.

Instructions

1. Park your BMW in a garage or in a place where you have space to maneuver around, outside is fine as well. As safety precautions, if you have a BMW equipped with manual transmission, place the car in gear and engage the parking brake. If you drive an automatic car, make sure the shift lever is placed in the parking position and once again, engage the parking brake. Many mechanics recommend to use wheel chokes to block the tires.
2. You need some tools before you start the oil change process. Make sure you have handy an oil pan, socket and socket wrenches, and a flat head screwdriver.

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To certify or not to certify? That’s been a popular question among BMW owners the last few years as BMW rolled out it’s certified pre-owned program for used BMW’s. It’s a program popular enough with BMW owners that it’s spread to many other higher end brands such as Lexus and Audi who realized how attractive this may be to those who are new to their brand but don’t want to buy a new car.

For those that don’t know, in BMW terms, the certified pre-owned program is a service you can opt for on any BMW over about 10,000 and under 60,000 miles. However, for a vehicle that is less than 4 years old and has mileage that low then you should hold off as the factory warranty is still more than likely available on the car. As for the warranty itself, it’s good for 2 years or the next 50,000 miles from when it is certified. But I digress, the important thing people need to know is that the items covered by the certification process are:

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Starting today, we will have some new content on our blog, we’re looking to mix up things a bit and start a section with How-to articles. We will keep the articles short and sweet, straight to the point.

The honor to start this new section goes to Stew, from BMWF1Blog, who will teach us what KERS is and how it works.

Straight from the 2009 F1 technical regulations is this definition of F1 KERS:

A system that is designed to recover kinetic energy from the car during braking, store that energy and make it available to propel the car.

Sounds simple enough.

The full KERS regulations are hugely complicated, but in general, units will be limited to 60Kw and the storage capacity for the device is limited to 400Kj. This means that a driver will be able to call upon an additional 80BHP.

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