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Originally Posted by jsh139
One Year Update
Well, it's been one year since I took delivery of my 2022 X3 M40i and I can honestly say that I am just as excited to own and drive this car as I was the day I picked it up. It just does everything so well. I rolled over 8,000 miles yesterday and it still looks and smells brand new. Still gets tons of looks and compliments and I'm glad I went with the Phytonic Blue, even if it shows dirt more than I had anticipated.
I love being able to putt around in Comfort mode or slap the shifter to the left and blast off when I need to. Changeover to Sport mode and it transforms the car into a nice canyon-carver (to a certain extent). It has more than enough power for me (for now, lol) and it really has no trouble outrunning or at least keeping up with 95% of what you'll encounter out there. The exhaust sounds so good in Sport mode and the suspension is really tuned well in the different modes. Not too soft, but honestly not too harsh either, even with the Alenza RFTs on. I do like my Conti DWS06+ tires a lot more, though. I'll put those back on in late November/early December.
I really thought that I would miss driving a manual transmission car, but this ZF auto trans is really a thing of beauty, and it's perfectly paired with the B58 engine. I don't know how they did it, but they really managed to program the shifts perfectly. No lugging the engine by trying to upshift too early. No having to constantly force a downshift when you need to hold the revs a little higher. It just seems to know exactly what you want to do, when you want to do it.
The auto stop/start doesn't bother me in the least. They did a good job of making it as unintrusive as possible. Like many others have complained, the Harman/Kardon stereo isn't the greatest. But, I've found that the more volume you give it, the better it sounds. If only they could make it sound as good at 25% volume as it does at 50%, I would have no complaints about it.
Gas mileage has been much better than I had expected, especially on the highway. I took a trip up from Philly to New York yesterday and averaged 33 mpg on the way up. That's with cruising at 75-80 mph in Comfort mode with the A/C on. Overall roundtrip (258 miles) mileage was 30.2 mpg. Over a year and 7,822 miles with about 70% city driving I've averaged 22.2 mpg with a best tank of 25.9 mpg. For a 4,400 lb 382hp SAV I think that's pretty damn good. And, obviously I didn't buy this car for it's stellar gas mileage, but it doesn't hurt that it does pretty well. Comfort was good, too. 2.5 hours up, sitting in a 4-hour meeting, and then 2 hours and 45 minutes home and I wasn't sore at all.
Only regret I have is not ponying up for the DAP package. Even though I don't drive on the highway very often, having the adaptive cruise control would have been helpful on the few road trips I do take it on. Normal cruise is perfectly fine for open highways, but I was adjusting my set speed manually more than I would have liked. Anyway, all-in-all, it's been a great year. I still get giddy when I get to drive it. I can only hope that the next year will be as good as the past one was.
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Great write up and thanks for sharing your thoughts! It's great to hear that you still get excited to drive it!