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      10-06-2019, 12:30 PM   #19
nachob
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Drives: 2004 330i ZHP, 2022 Cayman T
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: California

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Quote:
Originally Posted by juyeop View Post
...why would you import if there are 1Ms in the states?
Price was the main driver but not all for me. At some point Canadian and US 1Ms were listing for close to the same price in US and CA dollars. 61K USD for a US car with 9K miles for example and 61K CAD for the same car in Candada. Then in 2015, the Canadian dollar tanked as oil prices dropped. Cars were still listed at the same price but now 61K Canadian dollars was 45K USD instead of 55K. In my case, there was an additional thing. The 1M was intended by the people that designed it on weekends to be a back to basics, pure, non-gadgety club racer type M car. You can see Kay Segler discussing it in his roll-out video saying most will order this with no options. The base 1M came without NAV hump, wihtout idrive, without motorized folding mirrors, without parking sensors, with manual lighter seats with more head/helmet room. BMW USA in all their infinite wisdom like when they replaced the awesome M cloth interiors on the european M235i with vinyl to maintain a "premium" appearance, offered a deluxe package with the heavier options and fully loaded with idrive and NAV hump. Most of the cars in the US were ordered with NAV or the Premium package with power seats and motorized folding mirrors. Not only were the seats heavier, but they sat about 1 3/8" higher than the manual seats.

A few people, like myself did order strippers with no options...in my case only Sirius because I take long road trips but I had to pay extra for the privilege of getting it that way. I also had to argue, beg, plead to get it optioned that way. Most 1M owners in the beginning were people that got M cars every few years not necessarily the crowd that Kay Segler was targetting so for many reasons: Thinking that loaded would bring higher resale value, dealers ordering the cars loaded an not giving you a choice, people liking the gadgets etc few were ordered as strippers. Many of those that were ordered "properly" ( : ) in my humble opinion, sorry NAV guys just my opinion ) were diehard autocrossers or trackers so that left a very small pool of cars in the US that were manual seat, no-nav low-option cars that were not tracked, modified or autocrossed.

In Canada, while they got less 1Ms than we did...about 220 a higher percentage were ordered without NAV and power seats.

These are the lightest versions of the 1M and ironically, in the US all M2s came with power seats and they made a special edition more expensive M2 with lighter manual seats which you could get in the 1M. since you are new, many argue that the 38 or so lbs are not worth this but if you wanted the purest, lightest version of the 1M, these were them.

The Canadian 1Ms had a couple other cool options.
1. As iDontRemember mentioned, they strippers came with bluetooth and heated seats standard which adds little weight but makes the wives happy.

2. They also used the older tire circumference based tire pressure monitoring system that does not have TPMS sensors in the wheels so you can swap wheels without worrying about TPMS sensors, TPMS sensor rebuilds or TPMS sensor batteries.

3. Another cool feature of the Canadian 1Ms is that they have the same German KM only speedo which is very cool since I saw this on the German 1Ms when I picked mine up in Munich. It is so simple and clean and takes me back to Deutschland.

4. Canadian 1Ms were actually built to the same US EPA and California Air Resources Board (CARB) standards so they can be imported as "Conforming" cars that don't require retrofitting as long as you do an informal personal import. A business or dealer would have to retrofit only the speedometer if it was a business transaction.

So for me the combination that I was able to find more low option, low mileage, no track time 1Ms in Canada because many were stored for winter than in the US coupled with some savings over US models made it work out for me.
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Last edited by nachob; 10-06-2019 at 12:52 PM..
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