I should have added, the car she was driving was a '93 Camry hand-me-down from my dad. Starting to be afflicted by rust issues (body, fuel & brake lines, exhaust.. hmm just like the '93 ForkenSwift...)

Yeah, those nasty BMW owners are all alike...

:) yeah just buy a audi

Remember I said 9 out of 10 (not everyone) in MY area, which is largely a military community where most of the BMW owners are military - a good chunk of military people also have a Type A personality.

Metro - Is this her first NEW car?

Hmmm... no, I think her first new car was their Sienna minivan :) Couple or 3 years old.

Bro in-law phoned this evening: he loves the car. Said the drive home from the dealership this afternoon was "the most fun I've had in a car at legal speeds". That's a great sign.

Of course he spent most of his time trying to EV it everwhere, so his FE wasn't great - around 6.8 L/100 km or about 35 mpg (US) in a mix of urban & freeway driving.

Its EPA rating is 43 city/37 highway.

I can hardly wait to go play with it.

PS: SW, they were driving a rented 325 sedan this week.

The bro in-law said he also really liked driving it - but only when he was going fast :)

He also said he had a heck of a time filling it up when they went to return it today - pump clicked off a whole bunch of times. He said he'd read that was a quibble with this model.

Sounds to me like the ex-driving instructor needs to do a little instruction. No fee of course.:D

Played with the Camry today with my bro in-law. Fun, fun, fun.

Went to a quiet subdivision and tried to figure out how to P&G with it. They've got the base model, without the NAV video game feature, so there's only a small b&w LCD in the gauge cluster that shows energy flow (and a bunch of other stuff).

Trying to achieve "deadband" consistently (no energy flow to or from the battery) - ie. pure gliding - was very difficult. It would take quite a bit of practice to become sensitive enough to use the pedal to get that state on command.

Also, the thing doesn't have a "trip" FE meter! Toyota: that's just silly. Only current tank (and maybe also lifetime) is available. I guess you could stick a SG2 in it.

So I wasn't able to get a fuel consumption number for my driving. All I know is when we were done, the "eco meter" bar graph that graphically reports on the current trip was maxed out (on the good side). We didn't note the km's on the odo when starting out, so couldn't reliably back-calculate the FE from the change in the tank FE.

The car congratulated me when I shut it off: something like "Excellent!" appeared under the eco meter graph. :)

Oh - and it's a nice car too.

No trip FE is definately a bummer. Toyota dropped the ball on that one.:confused: The pedal is touchy but after a while you don't even think about it. How did the Brother-in-law do? I think you need to give him and sis some more lessons.:)