BMW

While I was on vacation last week I had to drive my brother and niece over to the hotel for the evening. We were short on cars (I don’t quite remember where mine was) so I ended up driving my cousin’s BMW. I am pretty sure it was a 750, but truly I am so un-interested in cars it’s hard to tell. I base my guess on the fact that the car is around $70,000. Yeah, talk about ridiculous expensive.

I got to drive around the winding back-roads of Shelton, CT to bring them to the hotel and back. Thank goodness it had a navigation system, since I keep trying other routes I think will be faster and end up getting hopelessly lost.

BMW advertises that driving one of their cars you know you’re on the road and in control. I’d definitely have to agree. I haven’t been in any other car where I could make a complete U-Turn on a two-lane road without backing up or swinging over the edge (I did mention getting lost, didn’t I)? I also felt every bump, groove and curve in the road. It was kind of exhilarating in a “glad I don’t do this all the time” sort of way.

While the navigation system was kind of confusing, turning the thing on was the worst. I think I lost bets as to how long it would take me to figure out.

It has a cool “Start” button on the dashboard. So, I get in the car and push it… Nothing. Anyone know what I was doing wrong?

Here's a picture of the dashboard, can you figure it out now?



Turns out that while it has a cool button and all, you still have to push the key fob into a rectangular hole then press start. Took my brother and I 5 minutes to figure that out. Don’t get me started on turning it off, took me forever to figure out the door had to be open to pull the key fob out again.

My final take on it, it’s cool to drive somewhat fast (45 – 55) on winding roads where you should probably go 25 – 30. I definitely understand why people driving those cars tend to go quickly, while you know how fast you’re going (it just feels fast all the time) you also feel like you can do anything.

Sometimes life even feels like this. Like we’re completely in control and know what’s going on. Life is moving so fast and we can navigate everything. We just feel great.

At the same time that things go so well we seem to have a difficult start/stop process that keeps people out who aren’t part of our crowd. When things are good I definitely feel like I don’t want to hear about someone else’s troubles. Everything is right with the world, so don’t ruin my reality. I’m so busy that I can’t possibly slow down to help you out.

In any case, I now think you should drive a high-performance car once in your life, just for the experience. Don’t buy one, that’s craziness, but if you can, give it a drive and see how the other half lives (at $70K, that’s definitely some half I’m not part of, what I could do with that much money).

Peace,
+Tom/Bob

posted by Tom at 2:15 PM