How to track your BMW i3 from order to delivery

Are you one to the early adopters that has taken a leap of faith and ordered aBMW i3? I say leap of faith since …

Are you one to the early adopters that has taken a leap of faith and ordered a BMW i3? I say leap of faith since it is BMW’s first real production electric vehicle. Plus, there so few of them here in the US that many people have placed their orders without actually ever seeing one in person let alone taking one for a test drive. If you have been lucky enough to test drive one, it was likely only for a short distance and on a designated route.

Plus, since there were no actual US spec i3’s here in the US until this week, all of the cars used for test drives have been pre-production European spec vehicles that didn’t have the polished fit and finish of a production vehicle. Oh, and if you did test drive one, you drove the fully electric i3 because there were no i3’s with range extenders here for test drives at all. So yeah, if you already have an i3 on order, you are likely an early adopter that is pretty excited about this revolutionary vehicle. Enough so to place your money down on one without really knowing for sure if BMW has delivered on their promise to make the i3 a “real” BMW.

So what can you do while your i3 is being built? You can obsessively track it’s every move, that’s what you can do, and this article is meant to help you do just that. There are various steps you can take listed below, depending on just how much you want to stalk your i3. Have at it!

Step One:  Get your production number from your client adviser. Sign into My BMW account at bmwusa.com. Enter your production number and select Track my BMW. There are six steps listed: Order documentation, Production begins, Production ends, En route to the U.S., Finishing touches and At your BMW dealer.

Step Two: Obtain the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number)

The VIN is typically assigned when the vehicle is well into production. Until it’s been assigned a VIN you’ll only have the production number to work with however you can get the VIN from that without even asking your client adviser.

To do so you need to look into the source code of your bmwusa.com tracking page. Here’s how:

- Log in to the My BMW section of the bmwusa.com web site.

- Go to the “Track my BMW” section.

- Once you see the state of your i3, use your browser to open the source code for the web page (browser dependant, but often a right click and ‘View Page Source’ or some such). Search in the HTML code for “VIN_7″, and right after one of those instances you will see value=”VX…..”.  That VX***** value field is the last 7 alphanumeric characters of your VIN.

(For the Safari browser on Apple machines, to view source code of a web page, you need to A) go into Preferences in the Advanced section and select “Show Develop menu in menu bar; B) Click on the “Develop” menu in the top menu bar; C) ”Click on “Show Page Source”; D) follow instructions above.)

Step Three:  If you only have a partial VIN, use the VIN decoder website to get the whole VIN: http://www.bmwarchive.org/vin/bmw-vin-decoder.html

Step Four:  Once your car has shipped, and is on a ship across the Atlantic, you can track that ship here: https://att.2wglobal.com/gstattweb/ocean.do?method=getDefaultOceanQuickSearchPage
Enter the last 7 alphanumeric characters of VIN in the Cargo ID box on right side. Alternatively you can enter your entire VIN. If you want to see all the i3’s listed on the ship, enter the wildcard “WBY1%” and you’ll see the list of every one on the ship.

See More In Source :  [ BMWBLOG ]