Well - it's over!

I'm sorry to hear you decided to give up the Box, but under the circumstances, I do not blame you.

I do have one question though, and I realise this is hindsight at this point, but I am curious nonetheless....

When you went to the dealerships to inform them of these problems, did you ever actually take a tech or the service manager out on a test drive and reproduce the problem for them? I know that when I had a problem with one of my previous cars, and I'd drop it off for the dealership to fix it, they could not reprodue the symptoms. I had an intermittent power loss that resulted in the car bucking hard, and a blip on the engine light. Usually whilst trying to merge into freeway traffic. Finally I said, "Let me drive." And I took the disbeliever out and reproduced the problem. They couldn't very well deny it when my car bucked so hard it threw the guy into the dash (he wasn't wearing his belt... tsk tsk.) "Did you feel that?"

They kept the car until they could solve the problem. Took 3 weeks to track down the broken coil pick up wire, but I never had a problem with that car after that.

Anyways, I wish you the best of luck with the Bimmer.