The Ultimate Driving Experience a.k.a BMW Uber Test Drive

Once a year in cities around the U.S. BMW USA holds events where you can learn more about their cars and even drive them more than around the block at a dealership.

https://ude.bmwusa.com is the link to find one near you. The locations change as they are scheduled. The one I did was just held in The Los Angeles Area. These events are sponsored by BMW and Area Dealers. They do hope to sell you a car. There are many of the latest and greatest cars to look at and a few to drive.

They have 4 different options to choose from:

Street Drives: Nothing really special here. Just a test drive of the car you choose. Free.

Auto Cross: A two hour class on how to drive a BMW M235i around a closed circuit course that test your skills as a driver. Fun and Free.

Teen Driving Class: A Half day class where any licensed or permitted driver under the age of 21 is taught some defensive driving and why you should text and drive. Accident avoidance is the main focus and I highly recommend that you take your young driver to learn these skills. And it's all free. Will your kid want a BMW when it's over? Maybe, but take them anyway.  A program like this costs at least $300 if not more where they are taught/

And I have saved the best for last. Why? $650  Not everyone can afford that much to play hard and drive fast in a BMW M3 and M235i.

You get a full day of professional instruction by real race car drivers and lots of time driving these cars to limits that unless you take your car to a Track Day you would never do with you car willingly.

The day starts with about 1 hour of classroom instruction on proper driving technique. Not what your parents taught you or your High School driving instructor unless your teacher was Danica Patrick.

They teach you to put your hands at 9 and 3, not 10 and 2. When avoiding something like an accident or that car coming at you, don't look at the thing you want to avoid, look where you want to go.

String Theory. Not String Theory from quantum physics but driving string theory. The three ways of changing a cars direction. And you thought that the only way to change direction was using the steering wheel.

Then the real fun begins. They take you out on the track. In this case it was a big parking lot marked of with cones and chalk but for sake of argument we will call it a track.

The instructors will show you how it's done once and then it's your turn.

The first thing they do is teach you how to really use ABS Braking. ABS brakes are meant to be used hard when avoiding an accident. All the way to the floor as hard as you can. If 1 is light pressure and 10 is hard, 10 is how you use them to stop. First you accelerate to 30, hold that and drive to the imaginary line marked by a set of orange cones. Then you get to see how long the car takes to stop. You do this again increasing 10 MPH at a time until you get to 60 MPH. The distance to stop at 60 MPH is not twice that of 30 MPH. It increases exponentially.

Once you have learned how to stop straight they add a turn at the end. A 90 degree turn, with the brakes still on. The ABS on a BMW and most recent cars  is not just anti-lock brakes but Alternate Brake and Steering. Now days they can sense if the car is doing what you want it to do. They figure if you turn the wheel you actually want it to turn that way. Anybody who has driven old ABS or cars without ABS that if you are going fast enough and you try to turn the car will just keep going straight.

Not anymore, now when you turn the wheel and slam on the brakes the cars changes the pressure on the brakes at each wheel so the car will do its best to make the turn as well. This is why if you are driving on the street or if you aren't on a track you should never turn off the DSC.

The next exercise is a 40 MPH lane change, no brakes. You accelerate to 40 MPH and change one full lane to the right without taking your foot of the gas and then stop in a box in the other lane just ahead of you. How often do you that?

And the last accidence avoidance maneuver is the box just fell off the truck in front of you exercise.  You drive straight ahead towards a cone and when the instructor tells you which direction to avoid it at about 60 MPH you either swerve right or left and get back in your lane and then stop straight ahead.

So far everything above is in the Teen Driving Course.

Lunch Time. A box lunch from a place like Panera or Paradise Bakery.  Soft Drinks and water are provided all day.

Now comes the real fun. It's time to put what you learned into action on the Autocross Track. If you are not familiar with Autocross, it's basically a course built in a really large parking lot made by putting up a bunch of cones where you have a bunch of turns with a few short straight aways and one longer straight away. Most cars don't get over 50-60 MPH on the straights and many of the turns are done around 30-40 with at least one turn at the end of a straight where you get to 60 MPH and brake down to 10MPH do a 90 degree turn and then floor it to the next turn. The whole lap takes between 34 and 40 seconds. For the next hour or two you take turns doing 3-4 laps in a M235i.

Time to go back to the practice area and do some skid training.  Now for those of you who didn't grow up where there is ice and snow doing donuts in a parking lot around the light posts this next event is for you. They have these sleeves they put on the back tires so that the car skids at about 10 MPH. You get to do skids in figure eights and ovals around cones. Even if you did this kind of thing as a kid it's not easy.

Back to the Autocross Track to compete for best time against the other folks in your class. There were 14 in mine. A very good number because there were 12 instructors.  They divided the class into two groups so the teams competed for best team and best individual overall.

We did a relay style race where you did one lap around the track and had to stop in a designated box. Stop with a wheel anywhere outside the box and you add five seconds to your time. Knock over a cone anywhere on the track, add two seconds to your time. Since the best times were 100ths of a second apart one cone knocked over could set you back 4 places. Stop outside the box and it could put you dead last.

The times were individual for First Place and cumulative for Best Team. Since it was a relay how fast you changed drivers counted as well.  Team time was from the start of the first driver to last driver stopped in the box. Watching 6 others in your team driving around the track was very exciting. You also got to watch the other team.

The times were so close that it was hard to keep track. Almost all the drivers were in the 36 second range give or take half a second. A few had times in the 38-40 second range on both teams. One guy on the other team stopped outside the box. One guy on our team knocked over a cone. This race was in the brand new M3's. These cars are far faster and stop much better that the M235i.

Once the final race was done we headed back to the clubhouse and got right to the awards.

I found out my team lost by less than 1 second. I also found out I had the best time on my team but was 3rd overall. I missed 1st by less than 1/2 a second.  There were a couple of guys making fun of the clock that kept time to 1000th of a second.

So do I recommend paying $650 bucks to spend the day beating up a new BMW? Absolutely! If you buy or lease a new BMW in the subsequent 60 days you get a code you give to the dealer that gets you $1000 off. Would I buy the car? Well, many of the folks there already drove a BMW. One guy had and M3 that was 10 years old and was debating if he was ready to trade up to a new one. He still loved the one he had and it had less than 45k miles on it.

So am I going to take my coupon and go down to the dealer and buy a new BMW. No. I find the base car really boring. Not a car you want to spend the hour most people drive to work every day. And the cost of the fully loaded Leather lined 24 speaker Harman/Kardon Sound system? 50k for the M235i and almost 80k for a M3.  Sorry, I don't find driving the car on the street or even the track any more fun than my Mazda Miata. It's not as fast, and it's not even as technologically advanced but it's as much fun to drive and even brand new, fully loaded half the cost.

In the BMW M3 you can do 80 MPH in like 6 seconds and not even know it. In my Miata I can go 0-60 in seconds and feel like I'm doing 80.

If your interested I have a coupon that can get you $1000 of your next BMW for sale. Make me an offer.