Hi red355,
I find myself in a similar dilemma to your self. (Just got the 335d coupe last Tuesday: 350 miles so far. VERY tasty indeed
. And that's having come out of a Z4M roadster this last summer........) So: whether to go for the 60K mile service pack or not? It isn't particularly cheap at £700. That money over the next 3-5 yrs is worth £800-850 in real terms. FWIW, even my dealer said its not worth it....... The first inspection at 18-20k miles is only £150. That said, what decides it for me is that I'll probably keep the car for no more than 2 years during which time I'll do 30-35k miles in it. But for you, if you keep the car for up to 60k miles..... then the decision requires a little more careful thought and consideration. The obvious thing to do is to add up all your servcing costs over the coming 60k miles. If that comes to circa £600-800, then the service pack ain't worth it.
As an aside, how is your engine freeing up with over 2k miles up?? I've only done 350 miles but am following my own break-in routine based on a lot of engineering-related articles on the Internet. When I had the Z4M, lots of folks on the Z4um were utterly convinced that the BMW break-in recommendations were NOT the best way to do things. These often-from-an-engineering-background-themselves folks seemed to know what they were talking about and gave a lot of references which strongly validated their assertion that an engine requires a few 10s of miles of gentle treatment and then NEEDS to be regularly revved to 80-90% of available revs (at light loads and for short periods of time) during the 'sweet spot' of 50-300 miles (certainly for petrol engines at least - I'm figuring for more like 1000 miles for a diesel engine). (BTW, I ran in my Z4M in as BMW recommends and by 5K miles it still felt a little sticky and reluctant up at the top end.... it was definately NOT as fast as my delaers demo which had been spanked HARD from mile ONE onwards..... the demo also felt much smoother and sounded sweeter than my own car did...... NO dealer demos get anything other than thrashed from day one.) I also did a lot of reading around about running in big diesel engines both truck and marine e.g. Cummings. The key thing in EVERYTHING I've read is how important it is to constantly vary the revs during the first thousand miles. As a result, I gave my 335d a very gentle time until 50 miles. Ever since, I've had the car in 'manual' mode so that every time I rev the car to 3.5, 4, 4.5 revs in say 3rd or 4th (which I do very frequently - even on the M-way I'll keep varying from 4th to 6th whilst at 80mph), I also make sure that I let the engine breaking slow the car back down which is as key to achieving a good break-in as is the revving (under light loading only) the engine itself. I did a trip of 120 miles each way this last Fri and Sat and I drove the car like that the whole time. I shall keep on driving it like that until it has done 1000 miles. Then I shall soundly THRASH the car to the redline on a very regular basis for another couple of hundred miles just to get everything sweetened up! (I would add that I would NEVER advocate revving an engine beyond half of the available revs until it is thoroughly warmed through.) The car already feels and sounds very sweet and VERY strong...... it pulls HARD from 60-100 in fourth, fifth and damn.... even keenly enough in sixth gear also. I'm VERY impressed
. There is a little spot locally (North York Moors) with a tight turn over a bridge and then a short few hundred yards run of uphill to a left-hand turn-off: the Z4M if thrashed to 8K revs in second and third gear would come over the little bridge at 20mph in second and hit 100mph in third by the left-hand turn-off. I cruised round the little bridge in the 335d yesterday and toed it (but not all the way and certainly not past the kick-down point) in 2nd (to 4k revs) & 3rd (to 4.5k revs) and was (comfortably) doing 90mph in 4th past the junction. Deeply impressive.
Mike