Munich, Germany: Test Driving BMWs with BMW On Demand

Ever wanted to drive a higher end BMW without going to a dealership and feeling awkward about test-driving a luxury car you’d never really buy? Besides, it’s not a real test drive if the salesman is trying to sell you the car every single minute of your dinky 10-15 minute ride. I’m sure a lot of you have been in this situation, and I have been especially. You want to test a nice car but the salesman either lets you drive it and harasses you about its features every minute of the drive, or they think you’re too broke because you look like you’re in college and just totally denies you a test run.

Well fear not for Ben and I had recently discovered a great way to test drive luxury BMWs without being denied or harassed! During our stay in Munich, Ben found out that the BMW Welt has car rentals by the hour on many of their cars. So we did what any German who had been away from home and dearly missed the autobahn would do. We rented a BMW M4 for the day and drove it through the autobahn! I would more accurately say we floored it than drove it.

Leif (a friend of ours) and Ben were especially giddy about this as they started the car and accelerated through the streets of Munich. It almost felt as if we were in a movie. The engine noise was intense and we got a lot of stares darting through traffic onto the autobahn.

The best part of the German autobahn is that some parts of the road have no speed limit (not all parts, especially if the roads are going through a town or city) and there is a hierarchy of faster cars on the leftward lanes and slower cars on the right. What this basically means is that as a driver you cannot be faster than the car to your left and slower than the car to your right under most circumstances. However if you’re driving super fast relative to everyone else then everyone else gets out of your way if they don’t want to be rear ended by a car going 100+ miles per hour. By now I’ve convinced myself that the Germans are either crazy to allow no speed limits or smarter

drivers than Americans. Without totaling the rental, we pushed the M4 to 270 kilometers/hr, translating to about 168 miles per hour. I’m sure we’d be in jail for a while if we ever tried this back home!

The BMW Welt website (through the BMW On Demand program) allows drivers to schedule a car for rent and shows prices by the hour. Renters can take the car for as long as they’d like without the sketchy car salesman (you can probably tell by now that I really dislike car salesmen) trying to pressure them to buy. I would like to take a moment to thank the BMW Welt for opening this up to make driving their cars, no matter how fast and expensive, accessible to everyone. It was a great experience and now my husband wants to spend our life savings on an M4. I don’t thank them for that.