X3: And true to the schedule…

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True to form at BMW/MINI, six days after ordering we are in production! We only found this out as, this morning we were going to make a change to the order (BMW is making the 21in rims available as a free upgrade)

So let’s see what the schedule could be:

  • Thursday and Fridays are shutdowns at Plant Spartanburg for Thanksgiving.  It normally takes 1-2 weeks for the car to be assembled, so I’m going to say December 4th will probably be the Production Date.
  • One or two days later it should be loaded on a train, so lets’s say December 6th.
  • Two weeks to get to Toronto, December 20th.
  • Preparation at the dealer and delivery, December 23rd.  Merry Christmas!

I think that’s an aggressive timeline though inline with other people’s experiences.

From that thread:

  • When you get your VIN number or production number from your CA
    (little tip, when you get your VIN number go to www.bmwvin.com and get the full spec of your car to make sure nothing is missing from your custom order)
  • Call BMW Canada 1-800-567-2691
  • Give the the last 6 digits of your VIN or production number.
  • You will get your production date.
  • You can keep calling everyday to find out which stage the car is at.
  • When the car leaves the manufacturing plant, they can no longer track it.
  • You call your dealer to get the rail car number.
  • Then you call a company called CSX that allows a person to track a rail car number.
  • Their phone number is 800-235-2352. When you call and the automated voice answers, say location. it will then ask you for the rail car’s initials which will be “TTGX” or something like that. It will then ask you for the rail car number and that is when you speak the numeric digits. The next step is to say done and it will tell you where the rail car is or was today.
  • Once the car arrives, you visit the Hansen’s site at
    www.lhf.com Type in the VIN number in the vehicle tracking field.
  • When the car is in their system, you will see the pick up date and delivery date.The status starts with active, dispatch, en route, to delivered or on hold just like my case. That is when you call your dealer and get a priority on it. Which I did and they picked up the car at the train yard which is 5 minutes away from the dealership.

So in the end it took a little over 2 weeks from production to delivery, if all goes well.