Saturday, January 22, 2011

Decision MADE!!!

Well this morning I took my 8 and 7 year old daughters with me to test drive the 550xi to see if there really was a difference between it and the 535xi. At least I wanted to see if the $10K over 6 years would really be worth it for the 550xi. We arrived at the dealership and the 550xi I had seen on the showroom floor was the only 550xi with the M Sport package available so they opened up the doors to the showroom floor and pulled it out for me to test drive. I totally wasn’t expecting them to take it off of the showroom floor for me to take out in the 25 degree weather to get salt and sand all over it. Big props to Fairfax BMW for showing a new customer a great experience.

All pretty sitting on the showroom floor.


Game, set, match. Hands down the 550xi is extremely responsive and the use of the 3 different suspension settings while driving it (comfort, normal, sport) were a HUGE surprise in my book. When you pressed the button in and put it into “sport” mode you could feel the car HUG the road (literally) even while going straight.

After the test drive we went in and sat with the CA at Fairfax BMW and I brought in my laptop with all of my spreadsheets built out with MSRP, Invoice, and ED pricing. I don’t think the CA thought I was prepared when I first showed up this morning. We sat and walked through the base price of the car and compared his ED price against what I got from the bimmerfest.com forums. We walked through every option, warranty, sales tax computation, dealer fee, destination fee etc. In the end we were only apart by $400 (not too shabby).

I drove home and opened up the laptop and re-ran all of my numbers and checked the terms of loans with my various credit unions to see what my monthly payment was going to be for X amount down on the car etc. I played with this for an hour or so and was extremely pleased with the results. Due to the down payment I am going to make on the car I won’t be financing as much as I did when I bought my Acura TL 5 years ago which is going to save me a couple hundred dollars a month. I guess that’s where the extra gas money is going to come from to pay for me getting the 550i instead of the 535i. J

Research never ends so I hopped on YouTube and walked some more customer delivery experiences along with some videos on the BMW Welt facility. I came across a video series that a BMW dealer out of California put together in 2009 of his ED experience. It’s worth checking it out, if you have the time.

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