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My new injectors really took a lot of the lag out of the machine. It felt like it was a fair bit smoother. When I was talking to the service guy he said the rubbers around the injectors would over heat and it would cause them to fail which caused the machine to have extra fuel in the cylinder. This could ultimately cause the machine to burn too rich and too much fuel and in the extreme cause cause hydrolock and engine failure. The new injectors took a lot of the harshness from the engine away. When I had the old injectors you could feel the engine burbling somewhat like a diesel but with the new ones that has really toned down a lot and made the machine feel a lot smoother.
Road & Track had an article about the customer care packages in their latest issue. Basically it sounds like it was a lot of huey about their engineers mistook how these machines would be driven here in North America. The assumed the engines would spend more time coasting and less time cruising and would be properly broken in with high speed runs and lots of pulls from stops. We here and NA don't have Autobahns but rather we have interstates and highways where we drive for 500km at 100km/h without touching the brakes or moving the needle on the cruise control. They programmed the alternator to only hold a charge under those conditions and they never really refill the empty battery. Coupled with the hot engines that require fans to keep blowing on them after they have been turned off the batteries were getting drained. The gaskets were never getting properly seated, and the machines were just genuinely unhappy. Rather than changing the alternator control systems to bump it up to charge more and face a potential lawsuit from the undoubtable loss of mileage the folks at BMW decided to lower the oil change interval and replace the battery with every oil change so the battery never gets fully drained.
I've never really liked these "Energy Dynamics" ideas from BMW. I was given a loaner 323i when my 7 and M5 were in the shop and I drove it for 300km in full eco mode. It said that because I was in full eco mode I saved 2.7 km of range during the drive. Now that I know what that means for the battery I know that the car probably just uncoupled the alternator from the drive belt and I ended up saving 0.1 liters of fuel at the cost for ~3% of the battery life. Assuming the battery gets replaced every 10,000km, and if the battery is around 300 bucks that means that savings of 2.7km cost me 9 dollars worth of total battery life.
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