Took delivery of a 2014 MS60 just about a month ago and wanted to give some first impressions and thoughts since this thread has been so insightful for me prior to getting a Tesla.
CPO Process:
Wasn't originally much interested in a CPO since I thought that I'd surely be looking at $55k+ for an AP-enabled car, but happened to speak with an advisor that explained they see deals there never make it to the website. He found me a 2014 MS60 with leather, tech pkg/AP1, heated seats, and Dark Metallic Blue paint for $46k. At the time, I had never imagined a CPO AP1 car would ever be sold so low. Now I hear about them decently often and I'm sure it'll just get more and more common as those 2014 leases get returned. I really wanted an 85 initially, but was in need of a car sooner than later and didn't want to take my chances that I wouldn't find as good a deal on an 85 relative to this one.
Pulled the trigger on October 16 and took delivery December 4, 7 weeks to the day of my deposit. Only part of the process that I could somewhat criticize, and even then it could be considered nitpicky, was that my advisor estimated 4 weeks to delivery before I had actually put a deposit on the car. I had searched the forums to see others' timelines and found the standard was 4-6 weeks, so I crossed my fingers and hoped it wasn't just an over-promise to get me to put in my deposit. On the upside, he was very good at responding to e-mails. The longest he ever took for a reply was still under 24 hours.
I split the past 3 years between a 2014 BMW i3 and 2015 528i, so many of my comparisons/impressions will come from that.
Some impressions after one month:
- Seats are not super comfortable. Wouldn't call them uncomfortable, but I prefer the more form-hugging 528i seats. My Tesla seats are flatter and not as contouring. They also seem a little hard, but perhaps that's more of it being 3 years old?
- Handles worse than the 528i. Like, a lot worse. Hard to say that it has poor handling because it's obviously way ahead of the i3, as well as many, many other cars, but surprised that it's not a little closer to the 528i stock suspension. And I don't mean in terms of ride comfort. I'm talking turning radius (MUCH wider than the 528i despite being only 3" longer) and just plain steering wheel responsiveness. Putting the MS in sport steering mode (AKA harder to turn mode) doesn't help its cause. I don't find that Tesla sport steering mode actually tightens up responsiveness. Just seems to make corrections more difficult. Sorry for the rant.
- Acceleration feels oddly similar to the i3, even though the MS should be considerably faster. Have been in a couple 100Ds and the difference between a 60 and a 100D is extremely noticeable, as you'd imagine it should be. Just surprised I haven't noticed more of a difference from i3 to MS.
- Hard to find the "perfect" place to put my phone where I can see it clearly and reach it easily. To the left of the wheel is not as convenient as I'm right-handed. In relation to the LCD screen, mounting it to the left blocks it behind the steering wheel and mounting it to the right is a bit far away. Tried clamp mounts, which I attached to various parts of the center console area to allow me to position the phone almost perfectly between the screen and cupholders, but the neck of the mounts wobbles way too much while driving. Tried multiple cupholder mounts, but they all place the phone too far back.
- Somewhat regretting not having an 85, not so much for the total capacity, but for the Supercharging speed increase. Broke in my 60 with an LA-Bay Area road trip and, while it was decently exciting to get introduced to the world of Supercharging on the way up, I was over it by the ride home and just wanted to hurry and charge and get back.
- Autopilot is great. Autosteer isn't perfect, but if you understand the system's limitations, it's generally easy to work with and anticipate trouble areas. I do worry about the wobbling it does while finding lines sometimes and making it look like I'm a drunk driver or making other people think I might swerve into them. To its credit, it does have to deal with the unfortunate southern California carpool line system that ranges from 2 to 5 lines most of the time. Personally, the best situations for autosteer for me have been at night and when there are reflectors on the road. I'm assuming reflectors are likely much easier for the system to work with as opposed to the normal lines on the road.
- TACC is pretty rock-solid. The i3's TACC is garbage compared to Tesla. I haven't used TACC in any cars besides these two, but Tesla TACC is smooth, anticipatory, and just amazing. I'm sure we still have a while to go until TACC in any car is indistinguishable from a good human driver, but this seems decently close most of the time.
- Obviously, Tesla tech in general is lightyears ahead of anyone else. Funny that BMW is one of the more techy makers and getting back into the 528i is like going from an iPhone X to a 2002 flip phone. It's so awesome that my 2014 Tesla gets the same software updates that 2017 cars get. Looking forward to the navigation update that Elon teased recently.
Overall, I love it and any issues it has I'm happy to have to deal with versus driving any other car. We have an Model 3 on the way and I'm looking forward to getting to experience all the hype for myself. Thanks to the all the people that have written up their impressions on the car. They gave me a really good idea of what I was getting myself into.
