Well, I deem that it has a pleasing shape, bitchin proportions - no contrived bling.. and I expect that the wind passing by will find it similarly bereft of places to play with vortices.

It's lovely and quiet, yes. One of the things that attracted me to this particular car was the fact that it has relatively small wheels (16") and pretty low-key alloys.

(And while I find a mere 5 cyl. to be adequate for topping 120 mph at 4000' elev., who could resist a W-32, were it foisted upon a pretty jaded-One? ;-)

Vroom! Yes, anything more than 4 sounds teh nice. That said, nice-sounding 4-pots do exist, for example, the flat-4 in the Subaru Impreza.

Now ya gets to wrestle with the Preservation:

Shall it be dino-oil, Sir? or the lovely syn-oil with superior ash remnants, better lubricity and a few other constants, yada?

All synthetic, all the time. Most Krautmobiles of the past 10 years have this requirement. Something to do with low viscosity at low temperatures.

Do we trust the wheel-installers / tyre-rotation folk to use their air-wrenches.. or shall we Insist upon seeing a sometimes-calibrated torque wrench applied to each of our critical wheel lug nuts?

It's going to be serviced at an Approved Independent BMW Specialist. This means that it will maintain its "Full BMW Service History", but I won't get the valeting, the courtesy car, or the round of golf (no, I'm not joking) that you get at a BMW Stealer. It's also about half the price.

(Note that over-torqueing, with some hub designs can lead to early brake-rotor warping. Fershure on mine, via reports.)

I leave that sort of thing to the men with spanners.

{sigh}

Trouble with us techno- perfectionists is not unlike imagining the keeping of Windoze from its inherent longing for seppuku: all those nit-picky Lists of Stuff you'd sorta wanta periodically check.. and all.

Ar. However, the 318 showed that a BMW engine can work well even when a bit broken; it had an airleak in the inlet manifold which buggered up the oxygen sensing, and the ECU just got on with it.

Meanwhile, if you're not going to do all of the fiddly-bit maintenance yourself, it's good to have some of that faith elixir, just Believe that the white smocked ones really do pay attention. (I yield to that one, now more often; still - doverai ni proverai remains my motto: trust.. but verify!)

Ian and the gang at Teesside AutoTech have a unblemished reputation. I'm better off trusting them than trusting me!