America is a great place. We have nearly instant fast food, Prime delivery in as little as a few hours, and you can go to nearly any car manufacturer’s dealership network and buy one of their cars in the same day. I’m all for instant gratification, but sometimes when you are spending tens of thousands of dollars you don’t want to compromise. This happened to me, again, when I decided, again, to buy a new BMW. This time, instead of an M4 I went with an M3. This is the last year for the G80 and it may be the last M3 offered with a manual transmission. Lots of maybes, but this time I decided to get it in the color that I wanted and without a bunch of extra options. I can rationalize with the best of them.
The full status run-down
I’ve ordered BMWs before, in fact the last one was for my long-suffering wife Peggi who wanted that lovely shade of blue for her new X5. Ordering an X5 is easy—not only because it’s made here in America (significantly cutting down on the shipping time)—but because BMW isn’t limiting production like with M cars. Fortunately, BMW makes it really easy to design your car with its slick website that allows you to try out different configurations until you find just what you and/or your partner wants. For Peggi, who prioritizes color over everything, you can try out different paint and interior combinations. For me, who prioritizes price and features, you can see which options require which packages and decide amongst them. So you get your “build” and save it, then what?
If it’s a standard car or SAV, you simply call, text, email or even drop in to your favorite BMW dealer with the build code and order the car. If it’s a more limited production vehicle like the M3, you have to start worrying about allocations. Basically that means that the dealer can only order a car after BMW has allocated a production slot for them to use. The dealer can use that slot to configure a car for inventory or allow a customer to submit their custom request. In the case of M cars, there’s usually more demand than there is availability, which means that you have to find a dealer with an available allocation, or wait for your dealer to get one. My preferred dealer had a waiting list for allocations, so I went searching elsewhere. You can certainly wait for an allocation to come up, but the dealers have no idea when or how many allocations they will get each month. I was lucky to find a dealer with an available allocation, and after a brief discussion about the price, I gave them a deposit and my car went into the production queue.
As you can imagine, BMW has a very sophisticated production scheduling system, and we’re fortunate that it shares some of the details with us. You can use its website or the “My BMW” app to add the car to your garage and track its progress. You can also call the BMW Genius hotline and they’ll be happy to give you a status update. When the car is initially scheduled for production, it receives a unique production number that you can use to track it. Once it enters production it is assigned the VIN, and from that point you continue to follow the progress with that ID. It changes from production number to VIN automatically in their system for you.
There are many status codes, only a few of which are shared with the customer, but briefly the sequence is:
- Scheduled for production (you will get a production week number, which is when it is scheduled to be complete)
- In production (body shop, paint, assembly, etc.)
- Production finished, in quality assurance
- Dispatched from the factory (waiting for transport)
- In transit (on a ship if it’s coming from Europe, on a train or truck if made in the USA or Mexico)
- At the dealer
There are many steps in which the car may be delayed, such as waiting for a ship, waiting for the VPC (Vehicle Preparation Center, located in the U.S.), then it’s going to wait for a truck or train to get to the dealer, and then it’s going to go through the dealer mechanical prep, wash, etc. If you order a car made in the South Carolina plant and live in North Carolina as we do, it can be just a few weeks. For a specific order from Europe to a delivery on the West Coast, it will be a few months. Unfortunately BMW no longer offers European delivery.
Another thing that BMW still does is allow for individual orders. That’s where you (with the help of your Sales Associate) can pick options that aren’t normally associated with your car and are not shown on the web site or app when you build your new baby. Options like a special paint color, or special interior trim. Yes, it will cost you extra, usually a lot extra, requires corporate BMW approval and will delay the production process, but it can be done and for some of us, it’s well worth the wait to get exactly what you want with absolutely no compromises.
In my particular case, as you can tell from the screen shots, I ordered a rarely selected color, Aventurin Red (a metallic burgundy) with the also rarely selected manual transmission. Try to find that combination in stock. It costs nothing extra to order a car, other than a bit of time waiting. But often it’s that anticipation that makes the arrival all that much sweeter.
The author with his freshly delivered M3.
