Part I - Pickup (archive)

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Everything with the pickup went pretty smooth. I picked a day when my salesperson had no other deliveries scheduled for the afternoon. I took a tad over two hours. There are plenty of details to check and I'd strongly recommend to anyone to take their time and set aside 2 hours for the delivery. Preferably, the delivery should be done when the service department is open - this will likely save you a second trip to the dealer. Go in prepared and do not expect your salesperson to know and remember everything that she has to do. Thanks to Jerry's Pickup List from e46fanatics.com and the Test-drive List from the Motley Fool, I was much better prepared for the pickup than my salesperson. Jerry's list is a total overkill, so what I did is underline all the things on the list that I wanted to check. The car's condition met all of my delivery requirements. However, not all of the key memory options that I had specified were set up correctly. The service department was still open, though, and they took care of it in no time. It saved me an additional trip to the dealer. Also, the financing of my car was for a longer term than the one that I had specified. It's OK with me, at 5.9% I really don't want to pay it off any time soon but just keep in mind that it's better to provide these details to the dealer in writing, so they'll have no excuses for screwing up. Another important thing to remember is to tell your dealer in advance that if they want an excellent review, they will have to earn it. My dealer treated me a lot better ever since I mentioned that to her. She even got me a BMW T-shirt as a present to make up for some mistakes that she had made in the pre-delivery process. She said that the review is the single most important thing for her and that she could lose her job due to a poor review. Good to know that you have a lot of leverage over the salesperson and you shouldn't allow them to push you around. I gave her 'excellent' on everything because she is a very nice person and she tried hard in the end. Off the record, I was less than impressed with her overall knowledge of the product. However, I always felt that she is trustworthy and if she's not sure about something, she wouldn't BS me and she would try to find out the answers. Trust is most important to me.

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