For my daily office commute, the M340i gives a fuel efficiency of around 6 – 9 km/l, depending on traffic.
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Crossed 1,000 km on the M340i yesterday. Today, it’s been exactly 4 weeks since I took delivery of the car.
Omitting the 11 days it was at Optimum Detailerz for the PPF installation, I’ve had the car for 17 days. In these 17 days, we’ve done 1 road trip to Lonavala and back, and another to Karjat and back.
Some observations:
- Ride quality is very stiff but you’d get used to that. For all the power this car has, you really cannot use it on most Mumbai roads, given how undulating the surface is. I found myself crawling over bumps and uneven surfaces, for the sake of both my spine and the RFTs/Rims.
- However, when you do get a stretch of free road, the M340i covers gaps like crazy. The car is like a horse, ever ready to launch into a full-blown gallop, and you have to hold the reins. In fact, I’ve found it a bit over-eager, especially in traffic, especially with the auto hold function on. If I give the accelerator a light tap to get it moving, it jumps ahead. Have worked around this by turning off auto hold in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and allowing the car to creep without accelerator input.
- The GC isn’t that bad. If you drive cognizant of the fact that you are in a sports sedan, most speed breakers are easily covered. I did the infamous Andheri – Ghatkopar stretch which is littered with unscientific speed breakers with a full load, on an airport run and still didn’t hit the bottom. Of course, the bigger breakers do need you to pull out the crab move.
- Not something you look at from an M340i, but fuel efficiency isn’t that bad. During both long trips, I did about 40% in Sports Plus mode and 60% in Comfort mode. Ended up getting around 11 km/l, which is not that bad at all. I would’ve got around 14-15 in my Octavia, I guess. For my daily office commute, I get anything between 10 – 12 km/l in Octavia. The M340i gives around 8 to 9 in the morning (with lesser traffic) and 6 to 8 in the evening (when traffic is more), all in Comfort mode. I haven’t yet driven extensively in EcoPro, will try that for a couple of days, just from a curiosity perspective. All of the M340i’s performance is on XP95.
- The My BMW App has very neat tricks. When we went to Saltt in Karjat, the car was parked under direct sunlight. By the time we were ready to leave, it would’ve been scorching hot in the car. I used the App to set a departure time and pre-cool the car so that by the time we entered, the temperature inside was much more comfortable than what it would’ve been otherwise.
- One of these days, I should just pore over the owner’s manual in much more detail. I’m yet to figure out several things, the main among them being Automatic Parking. This was quite straightforward in the Octavia, but I’m having trouble getting the M340i to recognize a parking space. Maybe other owners on the forum could enlighten me on the process?
- There’s this feature of the parking sensors coming on automatically when the car senses you’re about to park. Problem is, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the car thinks you’re about to park and turns on the sensors. And courtesy of the bikers and the auto wallahs, every single direction screams red with alternating long tones from the sensors. I had to turn this off (as I did with Octavia) since I felt this was very distracting.
- The ‘Hey BMW’ feature turns on when you say ‘Hey BMW’. But, it also erroneously turns off when you say a lot of other things. And then to get it to shut up is a task. I’ve also found that the system doesn’t really recognize my accent always. Other voice assistants like Siri and Alexa always manage to get it right. This may be a feature which BMW has to work on to get it to work better.
On the PPF Installation, as I had mentioned before, I had chosen Optimum Detailerz and the Avery Dennison Supreme Extreme PPF. While the application took quite a bit of time, there were some unexpected complications. The squeegee marks on the PPF were still there, despite natural curing for 3 days.
Amolji had called the AD guys to his site as well to troubleshoot, and the consensus was that it would naturally heal in 2 days under sunlight. I was given the car, with an assurance that this would either go naturally OR the entire job would be redone.
Anyway, it did go away after the Karjat road trip, with plenty of sunshine all along the way.
There’s a check-up scheduled shortly, where we’ll go over the car with a microscope and check the film performance once again. While the squeegee mark on the AD film was a bummer, the way AD and Optimum Detailerz responded was very proactive and customer-centric.
In fact, I haven’t even paid Optimum the balance amount for the PPF – have been told to do this once the inspection is done, and both Amolji and I are fully satisfied.
Adding a few pics post PPF and during the Karjat road trip.
Keyword: 8 observations of my BMW M340i after driving 1000 km in 17 days