BMW and M Power Owners

RichL said:
Looking at the M340i options list, HK audio is a must but not sure Technology Plus pack is worth it (seems like a lot of safety/parking aids). M Sport seats appeal. What options would you guys pick?

I might end up going new rather than nearly new as there are a few decent PCP deals available.
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Think I've posted elsewhere in this thread but will give my thoughts. I have a pre-LCI M340i with pretty much every option and if speccing from new now would go

1) Tech Pack Plus - this gives HUD and Driving Assistant Pro, the only 2 options I would not be without. H/K as well as a bonus although its not setting the world on fire.
2) M Sport Seats - The standard seats are bang average but these werent an option when I got mine. Limited colour choices though.
3) Visibility Pack - Lights are great but could live without. If you do a lot of driving on unlit roads the extra throw is helpful. I would likely spec these again although I prefer the pre-LIC Icon design.
4) Comfort Plus - Nice to have, but an expensive way to get electric seats and you can't get them as an individual option. 50/50 on if I would bother

Everything else I wouldn't bother with.

Biggest shock was how expensive these have become. Specced new to the same option level as I have is nearly £68k list! That is strong money to put it mildly.
 
Brok said:
Think I've posted elsewhere in this thread but will give my thoughts. I have a pre-LCI M340i with pretty much every option and if speccing from new now would go

1) Tech Pack Plus - this gives HUD and Driving Assistant Pro, the only 2 options I would not be without. H/K as well as a bonus although its not setting the world on fire.
2) M Sport Seats - The standard seats are bang average but these werent an option when I got mine. Limited colour choices though.
3) Visibility Pack - Lights are great but could live without. If you do a lot of driving on unlit roads the extra throw is helpful. I would likely spec these again although I prefer the pre-LIC Icon design.
4) Comfort Plus - Nice to have, but an expensive way to get electric seats and you can't get them as an individual option. 50/50 on if I would bother

Everything else I wouldn't bother with.

Biggest shock was how expensive these have become. Specced new to the same option level as I have is nearly £68k list! That is strong money to put it mildly.
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Its the bundling of stuff together that you dont want/need puts the price up. I quite fancied the B&W upgraded stereo (or whichever brand it was) when ordering my X5 but you could only have it in a bundle with the sky panoramic roof which cost £2400 alone making the upgraded stereo a £4000 option!
 
Brok said:
4) Comfort Plus - Nice to have, but an expensive way to get electric seats and you can't get them as an individual option. 50/50 on if I would bother
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This is very frustrating. I cannot understand why this car comes as standard with the sort of manual seat adjustment I have in a Mini. It really makes the interior look cheap when you open the door. This is annoying enough but to then have it so the only way to avoid is to find a car where somebody has picked Comfort Pack Plus, which comes with a load of things I don't care about like Comfort Access, is even more annoying.

Almost as annoying is the fact that you can't have a blind spot monitor - the sort of thing that seems standard on most cars these days - unless the car has Technology Package Plus?!

Buying a used car is always about compromise, but for me the minimum acceptable specification for an M340i should probably be:

1) Technology Pack - the head up display is absolutely brilliant and and I don't want a car without it in the future. Tech Pack Plus is well worth the extra but it's so uncommon that if you are buying used you are probably going to have to accept the fact you likely won't find one with that fitted. It's very disappointing that most of the benefits of Tech Pack Plus are genuinely useful safety features that should probably be standard.

2) Visibility Pack - the standard lights look terrible, reminds me of a basic model with no options with those two small LED bulbs as Daytime Running Lights.

And the most important, make sure it does not have that awful 'make everything on the car including the wheels black' pack which sadly they've made standard fit with no option of ever removing it on the facelift.

Of course most of these decisions are not 3 Series problems they are UK market problems - European 3 Series models do not require the Technology Package Plus for a blind spot monitor, they do not have black wheels as standard with no option to have the nice silver and grey ones on the facelift M340 and you can also get half leather seats too, which we are not allowed in the UK market.
 
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Are the seats fully manual?

I love the Merc config I have at the moment with manual forwards/backwards.

Full electric seats only really worth it if you have more than 1 driver.
 
[TW]Fox said:
1) Technology Pack - the head up display is absolutely brilliant and and I don't want a car without it in the future. Tech Pack Plus is well worth the extra but it's so uncommon that if you are buying used you are probably going to have to accept the fact you likely won't find one with that fitted. It's very disappointing that most of the benefits of Tech Pack Plus are genuinely useful safety features that should probably be standard.

2) Visibility Pack - the standard lights look terrible, reminds me of a basic model with no options with those two small LED bulbs as Daytime Running Lights.
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What gets confusing is that the packs have evolved over time, so pre LCI there was no such thing as Tech Pack Plus on the M340i, you had Tech Pack (H/K, HUD, Wireless Charging) and then the others were pretty expensive individual options. Hence why so few used cars will have Tech Pack Plus as very few have yet been manufactured and had a chance to make it onto the market again. It will be interesting in a couple of years when the first tranche come of leases/PCP as to whether more were specced when they were included in a pack. The used market has virtually no cars with adaptive cruise though, I'm trying to help a work colleague find one and they are rare to start with, let alone finding one at a decent price. They do tend to be extremely well specced when you do find them though.

I think the LCI light clusters all share the same DRLs regardless of whether Visibility Pack is specified so you get the same look with lights off, which again was different pre-LCI where the DRLs were much shorter and (imo) less attractive on the standard lights.

Finally there was a switch in 2021 production to include the 48v MHT and from that point the auto start/stop feature can no longer be disabled. Whether this is important to you or not is an individual choice but its something not necessarily obvious to people who don't closely follow the spec changes.

All this ignores the further minefield of cars produced in the pandemic where option packs had certain items excluded for certain cars (including some pretty major stuff like HUD or H/K), which will make buying a car from that period a minefield without an actual list of the installed components or careful inspection of the pictures.
 
Brok said:
What gets confusing is that the packs have evolved over time, so pre LCI there was no such thing as Tech Pack Plus on the M340i, you had Tech Pack (H/K, HUD, Wireless Charging) and then the others were pretty expensive individual options. Hence why so few used cars will have Tech Pack Plus as very few have yet been manufactured and had a chance to make it onto the market again.
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There was a Technology Package Plus before the facelift - not at the beginning of production but quite soon after, from around 2020 onwards.

It added Parking Assistant Plus, Drive Recorder and Driving Assistant Professional to what you already got in the Technology Package. It's listed in the 2021 brochure and I've seen cars on the BMW Approved Used website with it fitted as far back as about late 2020.

Prior to this you could have Driving Assistant Professional on its own for the actually quite reasonable amount of about £1200. You could also have Parking Assistant Plus on its own for £500, too.

I can't work out the exact date this changed but I do wonder if it was for 2021 model year, which explains why there are a few late 2020 cars.

Brok said:
I think the LCI light clusters all share the same DRLs regardless of whether Visibility Pack is specified so you get the same look with lights off, which again was different pre-LCI where the DRLs were much shorter and (imo) less attractive on the standard lights.
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The main difference is that the Visibility Package pre facelift had Laser lights - these are no longer offered. The Visibility Package now just adds high beam assistant and adaptive LED lights.
 
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Brok said:
What gets confusing is that the packs have evolved over time, so pre LCI there was no such thing as Tech Pack Plus on the M340i, you had Tech Pack (H/K, HUD, Wireless Charging) and then the others were pretty expensive individual options. Hence why so few used cars will have Tech Pack Plus as very few have yet been manufactured and had a chance to make it onto the market again. It will be interesting in a couple of years when the first tranche come of leases/PCP as to whether more were specced when they were included in a pack. The used market has virtually no cars with adaptive cruise though, I'm trying to help a work colleague find one and they are rare to start with, let alone finding one at a decent price. They do tend to be extremely well specced when you do find them though.

I think the LCI light clusters all share the same DRLs regardless of whether Visibility Pack is specified so you get the same look with lights off, which again was different pre-LCI where the DRLs were much shorter and (imo) less attractive on the standard lights.

Finally there was a switch in 2021 production to include the 48v MHT and from that point the auto start/stop feature can no longer be disabled. Whether this is important to you or not is an individual choice but its something not necessarily obvious to people who don't closely follow the spec changes.

All this ignores the further minefield of cars produced in the pandemic where option packs had certain items excluded for certain cars (including some pretty major stuff like HUD or H/K), which will make buying a car from that period a minefield without an actual list of the installed components or careful inspection of the pictures.
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The used market for the covid/chip shortage period is going to be a nightmare.

On my x5, at various times from order to delivery, it was going to be missing

H/K stereo
HUD
Touchscreen
Wireless charging
Wifi hotspot
Panoramic Sunroof
Electric towing hitch

The packs were still called the same, just had certain items deleted. Mercedes were in the same boat as well with lots of things missing from the AMG Premium Plus pack.

As it was they took so long with mine, it ended up coming with everything (although wifi needed a software upgrade and didnt work for the first three months as they had changed chip supplier and hadnt written the code yet)
 
[TW]Fox said:
To be fair I wouldn't expect any major issues on what was effectively a brand new car. It's once they get older that reliability and running costs become a concern - between 10k and 40k miles I'd imagine all he ever had to pay for was 2 services, a brake fluid change and some tyres.

Which, for me, is the problem with an M5. The M5 is probably the car I've always liked the most - but the type of car it is makes it, for me at least, a fairly useless purchase as they get cheaper. I don't think the M5 is a weekend car. It's a do everything car - if you're only using it occasionally and for low mileage then arguably its talents are lost on you and you'd probably find something like an M3 or even an M2 to be more suitable. If you are using it in such a way as to really benefit from what makes it so good, you're going to paying a significant amount of money in order to do so.

I've never had an M5 because every time an M5 becomes affordable, it's also got to the point where it's starting to need big money spent on it and it becoming less and less suitable for use as an everything car unless you've got so much money you don't know what to do with it, in which case you're probably already driving a newer M5 anyway.

The M5 is amazing because 90% of the time it's an ordinary 5 Series with all of the benefits of usability that brings, but 10% of the time it's really something very special. But just how much money do you want to pay to run a car that, 90% of the time, is an ordinary 5 Series, to get that 10%? And if 80% of your driving is for fun, then the fact it'll sit on the Motorway for 300 miles in complete comfort is really not that useful for you.
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Yep
But by God that 10% is freakin awesome........
Did the Pyrenees this year.... Stunning and the car was amazing. Thirsty though.. But who cares
 
[TW]Fox said:
I can't work out the exact date this changed but I do wonder if it was for 2021 model year, which explains why there are a few late 2020 cars
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Must have been around then at the earliest as mine is November 2020 registered and is on the original pack specs.
 
So a bit less exciting than initially hoped, but picked up a 2019 G21 today. 330i, M Sport with a fair spec - tech, msport plus, comfort and premium packs. Replacing a leased 2020 Leon Cupra, massive step up in interior so very happy.
 
Alas I sold my BMW M4 back to Sytner. Received £5771 in equity which I'm very happy with. Sytner (Harold Wood) tried to take the mick however - in the summer it was valued with ~3.8 equity; they knew I was desperate this time *(my fault, I mentioned I was back in the UK for a short period) and offered me an additional £800 after clearing the finance. Whacked it on autotrader, phone was going off with a lot of chancers - DNA Autohaus came with the best offer of around 37.5k. Received an email from the Sytner group buyer who agreed to my asking price on AT, car was also on motorway where it went for 40771, had the Sytner buyer match that and ended up selling the car back to Harold Wood for higher price :D




She will be missed however, and honestly with the way the market is going I doubt I'll ever step foot into another m car again
 
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[TW]Fox said:
How are you finding the car? Enjoying it?
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Assuming this was directed at me, I'm still enjoying it nearly 2 years into ownership and still firmly believe it was the best choice available to me for class and budget. I can't think of anything else I would switch it for other than perhaps the touring for the odd occasions where the fixed parcel shelf is a pain but they have been few and far between. It is pretty docile when pootling about but easy enough to have some fun with a bit more right foot. I have secondary school age kids and it will stick around for at least as long as I need a family car or it dies. I will be left with a hard choice when it comes to replacing it as if new prices keep increasing even a like for like is going to be a big number.

The only thing I would really change is the standard seats are (imo) pretty hard under your bum, I thought the ones in my F36 were more comfortable. Not sure if Merino would improve that but mine was AUC and had everything else I could want so was willing to compromise. The lumbar support is also very hard so I have that permanently retracted as far as possible, definitely an option I could live without.

I never use the lane guidance as it just feels too weird but adaptive cruise is used frequently when I'm on dull journeys.
 
Hi guys, service question to maintain warranty on an e90 for family member.

It had oil, cabin and spark plug service 2 years ago by independent. Has done 2k miles since. Oil service light has come on.
Sytner saying its due oil, cabin, spark plug service again because that's what their computer says from the key. I disagreed saying only the oil service light came on and it can't possibly need new spark plugs after 2k miles in 2 years.

It has bmw warranty on it, what does it really need to maintain the warranty?

The big ramp sign obc is not due for another year.
 
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