The tail of an arctic storm was whacking Los Angeles as I got reacquainted with our Z4 roadster. Previous, short stints in the car had left me indifferent, chiefly because I felt its sequential manual gearbox (SMG) blunted the two-seater's better qualities. SMG's responses to my prompts with the gear lever or paddle shifters felt clunky, particularly on the upshifts, and the "Drive" mode seemed indecisive, hunting for the right gear and often selecting, for me, the wrong one. It all made the SMG far less rewarding than BMW's slick manually operated transmissions.
However, accepting that my lukewarm response to SMG might have been fashioned out of inattention rather than senseless technology, this time around I vowed to focus on the electro-hydraulic system's operation. I even cracked open the owner's manual to see if it might reveal an essential technique to using SMG, turning my balky progress into smooth, Montoya-esque gear selection.
As with many publications of its type, the SMG manual's language is a riot. Consider: "When the speed is reduced, the gearbox is automatically downshifted shortly before a gear-dependent minimum speed is reached without you taking any action." However, while struggling through the challenging syntax, I came upon this tantalizing bit: "The acceleration assistant permits optimum acceleration on skid-resistant roads at a racing-speed level."
Well, even if I wasn't quite sure what that meant, it definitely sounded worth exploring. As instructed, first I activated the "Sport" program via the console-mounted button, then pressed the "DSC" button for more than 3 seconds. Had I not been idling in our underground parking garage, I then would have pressed the accelerator "...all the way down rapidly-kick-down. The optimum rpm for driving off will be adjusted."
Best wait for a skid-resistant road, I concluded, to find out the results of all that optimum rpm. For now, just get to know how to work the damn thing before I started wrecking it. (As one of the few unequivocally clear passages in the manual puts it, "Using the acceleration assistant leads to premature wear of the vehicle's parts since this function places a very high strain on the vehicle.")