[pw4]

I think I have the spare wheel situation sorted at last. Full-sized spare, bottle jack and exhaust-inflatable jack-bag-thing, and tyre gauge of course. Overkill? Well, I had a flat tyre last month, so no.

BMW uses strange, rectangular jacking points that nothing fits except the official BMW jack which isn't sold here in Australia. The bottle jack has a round top which will fit into the rectangular slot safely - but it's too tall to fit under the 230i. So the exhaust jack is to raise the car enough to get the bottle jack under a jacking point. I used to use an exhaust jack back in my track days to swap track-day wheels on and off, and it worked really well to lift the whole side of the car. My new one is just a cheapie but it looks well-made and might do the job on its own if I can't get to a level surface for the bottle jack.

As for the spare wheel, I bought that straight after I got the car. It matches the front wheels so should also do the job temporarily on the wider rear if necessary. It just has a cheap "performance" tyre atm, but at the first tyre change the best of the existing fronts will become the spare. I chose a full-sized spare rather than a space-saver for 2 reasons: (i) sure to fit over the Msport brakes, and (ii) space-savers will usually get you to the next town, but in Australia that town is sometimes more than 50 miles away and anyway it's very unlikely to have a tyre to fit BMW 19-inch wheels. Three times on MINI club road trips, someone had to hobble along to the next major city to get the right size of any brand, even with MINIs' more usual 18 inch wheel size.

As for last month's flat, I was on a 250 mile road trip from Sydney, but fortunately the flat happened while I was still in Sydney. The car alerted me to low pressure, my tyre gauge read it at 240KPa (around 32psi?) which is fine to drive on so I took it a tyre place to get it fixed on the spot, rather than needing the spare. Out in the countryside, it would have been after business hours and the spare would have been needed.

I know there are spare kits in the USA it's too expensive to ship something so heavy to Australia. BMW here doesn't offer anything in the way of space-saver wheels or jacks, just a can of goo and tyre pump, as standard in the car. I've complained on every BMW survey and at least their new surveys ask about the importance of a spare wheel - I'll take that as some sort of progress.