If German trains can't run on time, what hope do the Italian ones have?
At least that was my thought when planning my recent trip to Italy. Rome has an extremely convenient direct rail link from the airport to the city center, but when looking at transit options from there to the Amalfi coast, it was...less confidence inspiring.
The easy part would be taking a train from there to Napoli Centrale. After that, it was only an "up to two hour" wait for the next train taking you to the southern-most point of the metro Naples area, where you'd wait for almost another "up to two hours" for a bus that takes you the rest of the way. Well, actually, it's two buses with the same route number, and you apparently have to physically transfer from one to the other.
All said and done, the transit option would take eight and a half hours, assuming all goes as Google says it will. Which it won't.
But then what? The Amalfi coast isn't exactly the most walkable place. Sure, the distances are not vast, but the shortest walk route to a local restaurant entails climbing 450 steps each way – the best transit route to the furthest stop of the trip is a one-hour bus ride in the wrong direction, to catch a boat heading back in the right direction (for another hour), all for the low, low price of about sixty euro per person.
Obviously, I decided to just rent a car instead.
Given four people were going with me, I couldn't just rent a Fiat 500 and be done with it. I needed something big and comfortable enough to get everyone and their luggage there, while also being small enough to squeeze between a rock wall and a bus coming the other way, on a lane-and-a-half wide road.
Enter the 3-series touring, the rental car I reserved. It was the ideal combination: small enough to fit everywhere, large enough to fit everyone, with a trunk spacious enough for the two pieces per person that we were going to bring.
What I got was what I reserved, save for the whole wagon thing... Generational bloat worked in my favor, though, given five carry-ons and five backpacks all fit in the trunk. Just.
Somehow, I got a surprisingly well-specced car for a rental:
- M Sport Pro (adaptive suspension, better brakes, LED headlights, M color stitch seatbelts, M steering wheel, M Sport body kit)
- Active Driving Assistant Pro/full active cruise with stop-and-go
- 360 cam
- Comfort access with kick-to-open trunk
- Parking Assistant Plus
- Power memory seats
- 3-zone automatic A/C
But because this is Europe and you can get your options a-la-carte, it also had a cloth interior and no sunroof! This cloth in particular is a mix of a velour/alcantara-like fabric and somewhat more traditional cloth. It's always a comfortable temperature, is very smooth to the touch, and holds you in place no matter the G-forces at hand. I liked it a lot.
I was particularly glad to have Active Driving Assistant Pro and the 360 cams – the former because my ensuing 3+ hour drive was preceded by a plane ride. The latter, because...well, we'll get to that one later.
Anyway, the self-driving did a bang-up job, keeping the car dead center in the lane and being easy to use and generally figure out. All it needs to steer for you is minor pressure on the steering wheel, so leaning your hand on part of the rim will placate it.
Just know that if it encounters something it cannot process, like a completely unlabeled construction zone, it will abruptly disable the steering assist and you'll have to take over immediately. But since you're already paying attention (right?), it's no big deal. This happened to me precisely once (and on the way back, at that), so while you should be ready for it, it won't really come up all that often.
On that note, I also learned the car will adjust how said assist systems work based on the region you find yourself in. I noticed the car won't allow you to take your hands off the wheel for more than a few seconds in Italy, versus Canada where you have quite a bit more time. Take that information as you will.
By the time I passed Mt. Vesuvius, southern Naples, and got off the Italian motorway, I was rather well-rested due to the self-driving having taken on the significant majority of the labor. It works.
And good thing, too, because the fun part was just about to begin. As you make your way onto the local roads and into the mountains, lane width becomes an abstract concept, and hard shoulders the stuff of legends from a far-away land. This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that there is only one road, and everything up to and including suburban buses and dump trucks have no choice but to use it.
Oh, and people don't really like to slow down and lose all the momentum they've built up.
Say you're driving into a blind corner. Stone wall on your right, retaining wall on your left. No center line, as this stretch is too narrow for one. The hard shoulder is maybe a few centimeters on either side. This particular corner has no convex mirror across the apex to show you what awaits on the other side.
Turns out there was a giant bus barrelling towards you. You don't find this out until you're almost all the way around the bend – there's only enough room in this town corner for one of you, and he didn't honk to let you know he was coming. A couple cars are already queued up behind you.
You slow down and point yourself even moreso to the right of the road, but that's not enough. He's already up against the retaining wall to your extreme right. You're thankfully familiar with the dimensions of your car – you see there's probably a couple more cm's on your right, and less between you and the bus on your left. You feel confident in your abilities to create some space where there is none using just your eyes and instincts. But it's your first time on this road, after all, and it's silly to not use those 360 cams while you have them. Because if you don't now, when would you?
You press the hard camera button by the shifter and back up about 30 cm to give the bus space to pass, then you thread the car forward as the movement of the bus creates more room the further forward he goes. You look through the windshield with one eye, and at your center display with the other, as the moving convex wall that is the bus' left side passes your left front corner. The parking sensors play the monotone song of their people as the gap between you and literally everything else in that moment maintains the low single metric centi-digits. All the while, both you and the bus inch forward in unspoken, spur-of-the-moment, coordinated harmony.
No words are uttered. No horns are honked. No traditional communication at all. Just pure, animalistic, instinctual body language expressed through vehicle movement. It's like a tango, both in spontaneity and closeness. And in culture, now that I think about it.
The sensors start to sound like a non-flatlined heartbeat again. You can now see daylight behind the back of the bus. As quickly as it began, it's over.
You use that low-end diesel torque to leave the situation like it was never there, braving towards the next corner where you might encounter the same thing again. Or maybe it'll be two tourists going slow on their rented Vespa. Or maybe it'll be a local driving his Fiat Panda within an inch of its life (figuratively and metaphorically). Or perhaps it'll be a black '99-01 F-150 SuperCab 4x4 on French plates...
It could be anything, really, waiting for you around the next blind corner. But that's part of the fun.
I truthfully wasn't too surprised how well the G20 handled these mountain passes, given if there's anything you'd expect, it's for a BMW to handle twisty roads like it's right at home. What I never saw coming, however, was that it would also be comfortable enough for the adults in the back to fall asleep while I was carving these same corners!
A surprise was the amount of power, too. I didn't realize the 330d is actually a six-cylinder, so I assumed the 20d suffix on this one would mean I'd have to floor it a lot. Turns out that was far from the case.
While it makes a relatively modest ~190hp, it was more than enough grunt to pass people or assert your dominance on narrow roads with maybe half-throttle at most (who gets to the gap first, goes through it first...don't drive this way, and best-case, you'll mess up traffic flow – worst-case, you'll get into an accident). I never wanted for more power.
The other side of that little "d" on the back means it's a fuel-sipping diesel: its 7.2sec 0-100km/h time comes with an attainable 5.3L/100km average rating, or a 900km range on a full tank! I drove it from Rome to our digs in Furore, then as far east as Maiori, as far west as Sorrento, and as far north as Pompei and Mt Vesuvius, and then all the way back to Rome again. I didn't stop for fuel once, and I wasn't at all trying to be efficient.
One final surprise, albeit an anti-climactic one. The G20's take on iDrive 8 actually has hard buttons where its siblings in the lineup have touchpads or nothing at all. It's not a huge difference, but I'll take any extra physical buttons that I can get.
Despite some not-so-exaggerated rumors, a new BMW you'd actually want to buy still exists.
The current 3-series handles very well, but is comfortable enough to let your passengers fall asleep while you're driving it the way it was meant to. It's also the ideal size for, say, taking five adults and all their luggage on bi-directional Amalfi coast blind hairpins not wide enough for two vehicles... The 360 cam helps when giant buses want to squeeze by you, and the largely-autonomous cruise control takes the edge clean off long and/or tiring drives.
Plus, if you're in Europe, you can get one with cloth seats and a diesel engine. I'd buy one either way.
-Uroš M.
2025 BMW 320d xDrive M Sport Pro
[four-door compact sedan; all-wheel drive, front engine]
[four-door compact sedan; all-wheel drive, front engine]
L4 16-valve, DOHC
Twin turbocharged
DIESEL
[forward gears]
AUTOMATIC
w/ manual mode
48v
mild hybrid assist
10 hp, 88 lb-ft
0.4 kWh
lithium ion
[top speed] 228 km/h
[L / 100 km]
highway
5.2
No comments:
Post a Comment