Rental Car Ruckus 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Sijray21]

SoCal Rental for a weekend - BMW 430i Convertible MSport

First Impressions:
Pretty to look at and BMW quality. About 22k on the odo. The low-coolant light came on about 20 minutes into the drive out... Bought some Distilled water and filled it up the next day when it was cool. Thanks Enterprise...

I drove this from San Diego Airport to Temecula and back to give my mom a companion for her 50th HS reunion. While she hung out with her former classmates i mostly just drove this thing around and gambled at the casino. The canyon roads were fun.

Driving:

Comfort Mode - Want to cruise around town and be comfortable doing so? Perfect. This was not for the quick accelerating in-mind and definitely felt more of a disconnect with the road. Not really ideal for a sport-oriented car, so i'm not sure why you'd even get this car and drive it in this mode a lot of the time. I didn't feel any difference in the suspension, so either the changes were so minute that it didn't matter or it didn't have dynamic suspension (probably the latter). Steering had more play and the throttle response was abismal in this mode and sometimes quite annoying. Maybe something i would've gotten used to over time, but initially it was really annoying to have dead travel in the trottle pedal...

Sport Mode - Where this car shines is leaving it in Sport Mode. Throttle felt much more responsive, but still not great. I still had some 'dead-travel' before the throttle kicked in that i haven't felt in any other cars i've driven for more than a test drive. Steering was tighter and felt heavier, which was nice; not a huge change, but noticeable. The turbo was louder and the boost seemed to come on sooner.

Overall Feel: This car was fairly quick, but it definitely felt heavy. I didn't look up the specs until now, but wow... 4050lbs. I guess that's partially because of the power hard-top, but man that's porky. You could feel the weight around the corners, but it still maintained its fun-to-drive nature. The weight of the folded top did help to keep the rear planted as it sits basically over the rear axle; i tried to kick it out a few times in sport+ mode, but that wasn't easy. The stock run-flats had decent grip, but were loud and a touch on the firm side.

Liveability/Rentability:
Obviously this is for the purely fun in-mind. I wouldn't expect much utility or practicality from a convertible and this was no different. Trunk room with the top foleded was essentially non-existant and the rear leg room was what you expect (small kids or people with no lower legs only) unless the driver and passenger are fairly short. We had to use the back seats for our luggage with the top down, so if you rent one of these with more than 2 people you'll need to keep the top-up to move luggage around. The folding top took a while to go up and down, so it's not something you should be doing at a stop light like other 'verts can do. The BMW iDrive took some time to get used to, but was fine. Bluetooth media streaming cut out every time a call came in forcing me to reconnect the phone or turn the radio on/off (is that normal - b/c if so, that's awful). Nav worked well. Speakers/sound was great. Visibility with the top up was great (no b-pillar blind spot). The sport seats and adjustability was great.

Gripes: no cooled seats, could use more power (i think the 440i would've solved that), and a little surprised by the lack of rear leg room.

Ideal Market for renting:
Southern California (or other area with abundant sunshine and not so hot weather) with 1 or 2 people for a week or less.

Ideal Market for buying:
Someone who wants a purely fun convertible that may have to tote around a couple small kids every now and then (without luggage).


I would never buy this thing (especially at its price point - $50k, lulz), but it was fun to have for a weekend. A couple hundred $ was well worth it.



Top Up


Notice the lack of storage in the trunk with the top down. If you had something relatively flat you could put it in there, but for the most part it's useless with the top down.



The rear seat leg room with me driving (6'1" with 33" inseam)