Thank you - excellent article. Wife's E92 is the first iDrive BMW in our house and now you can count both of us in as iDrive addicts. It took both of us 30 minutes to get 80% there. The rest is practice. The single iDrive Controller located where it is, right under your right, hand makes other carmaker's solutions seem primitive by comparison.
Our neighbors, both of whom drive a Lexus, joined us in the E92 recently for a weekend drive to Las Vegas. They both commented about the ease with which I appeared to move between Navigation, iPod, FM Radio, RTTI, etc. In my neighbor's Lexus SC430, by comparison, they have to touch the screen and look for the right dedicated button, and only when the car is not moving. I started to almost feel self-cnscious, knowing that they were following my every iDrive move on the trip. "Show me how you did that!"; they would demand again and again from the back seat.
And the wife is more fluid in iDrive than I am. Whenever I bring up to her the iDrive controversy, she looks at me like I have two heads - WTF! Anyway, with a little evolution I think BMW nailed this. Count us in as two drivers who could not see a world without iDrive.
