THE GUY I BOUGHT the car from removed the license plate. I drove home w/o one. I was passed at one point by a police car, so it’s clearly not a big thing. Unfortunately, the guy kept the screws that hold the plate in place. I stopped at a car parts place on the way to register the car a couple days later. The screws were the wrong size. I stopped at a different place. Google to the rescue.
A few days later I went through the car wash. The license plate was half off the car! Closing the lift gate or going through a car wash was enough to cause the left half of the plate holder to fall free. This became the first repair.
This was a five-minute job including washing the part of the lift gate covered by the license plate. The license plate is attached to a frame with four screws. The frame is attached to the lift gate with two screws that go into plastic plugs. The left most plug was worn/damaged enough not to stay snapped into the sheet metal. Perhaps this has been a problem for BMW, the new part is a big chunkier than the old one. I reinstalled the frame and reattached the license plate. Now it’s time to hit the carwash!
The part is called a “plug-in nut” and has BMW part number 51188242693.
I HAD THE chance to attend an eight-hour BMW driving course. I got to spin out in the most expensive car I’ve ever driven – several times. OK, “got to” is not quite correct since I didn’t really intend to… A few months ago I discovered the BMW Driving Academy and decided to attend a class. I am very glad I did. I did it for fun, but there is really a lot of good safety and better driving information. Although I did the class in German, they offer training in English as well. I asked if they would take a VAT Form, which they had not yet heard of. It took a few weeks, but they agreed to do so, saving me 16 percent on the cost of the day. You will see in the pictures and video that it wasn’t a beautiful day, but the weather cooperated enough that we never got rained on. But, just in case, they do the training in the rain as well. The training was great. It included learning about how to position yourself properly in the seat, a tiny bit of “car physics” and why you can/will have understeer/oversteer problems and lose control, emergency braking, emergency lane changes, steering with maximum braking, and a timed slalom run at the end. I’ll let the photos and video speak for themselves.BMW Driving Course
