If you've ever spent time perusing & configuring vehicles on the BMWUSA.com website, you might find it interesting to do the same on the home-base German site, BMW.de - both sites are kinda fun, it looks to me like the German site is somewhat more graphics intensive, One fun thing on the German site, you can select wheels (Räder, under "Exterieur") and the car graphic shifts to a close-up view of the wheel-well, a couple of dyno-rollers appear, and spin the wheel - cool! Comparing offerings, with the exception of the smaller range of engines available in Europe & elsewhere, it looks like the U.S. can get most everything BMW sells - we miss out on the 1-series 3 & 5 dr. hatches & Active E, 5-series wagon (pity, that - although the 3er wagon now must be as big as an E34 wagon), and from all outward appearances what looks like a 2-series minivan, the 2-series Active Tourer (can't say I blame BMW NA for not asking for that one...). BMW Individual colors are available on the M4's on the .de site, but not here - pity, that, too, since compared to the standard paints on the state-side M4's, a couple are realllllly nice. Here's a pic of the M4 Individual colors - left to right: Azurite Black, Moonstone, Tanzanite Blue, & Pyrite Brown. It looks like in the US, 3 of these can be had on US 5er's, with the Tanzanite apparently only for 6's, & the Pyrite only for 5's, including M's for either. I don't know what it might take to get any of these on a US M4, but I think the M4 looks better with either the Azurite or the Tanzanite than just about any of the stock US colors. Sakhir Orange looks kinda over-the-top really, really orange (but, hey, I guess I wouldn't complain if one magically appeared on the doorstep), the Austin Yellow is some sort of indescribable mustard color, the Yas Marina Blue is too light, but hopefully stands a chance of looking better in real life, the Silverstone appears to have some kind of unusual light-bluish tint, the Sapphire black is the typical boring ol' black, Mineral White is equally conventional, leaving the Mineral Grey as the only understated, not completely-over-the-top-look-at-me color, that's not quite so absolutely mundane & common as to make it un-thrillingly, completely boring. Oh well, beauty's in the eye of the beholder - it will be interesting to see what buyers &/or dealers opt to purchase or stock-in. It would be nice to see that Azurite Black in-the-flesh - then, should that random lottery ever come through with enough to spare to bribe the BMW paint poobahs, it would be easier to decide between that & the Tanzanite!
I do wonder what drives the availability of "individual" paint for some models and not for others. Dealers in this part of the world seem only to work in the black to silver spectrum with another color being so dark it is trying to be black most of the time.
