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BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine, for Driving Through Gunfire and Grenades

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Re: BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine, for Driving Through Gunfire and Grenades

#26

Interesting read on the BMW 7 series Protection vehicle. Here's a tidbit from the field: I've heard, through the grapevine, about a team responsible for the safety of a certain high-profile individual (no names mentioned, of course ). About a year ago, they made a strategic shift away from BMWs as protection vehicles. Why? Because in emergency escape scenarios, it's crucial to be able to move the car even with the do…

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Re: BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine, for Driving Through Gunfire and Grenades

#27

Interesting read on the BMW 7 series Protection vehicle. Here's a tidbit from the field: I've heard, through the grapevine, about a team responsible for the safety of a certain high-profile individual (no names mentioned, of course ). About a year ago, they made a strategic shift away from BMWs as protection vehicles. Why? Because in emergency escape scenarios, it's crucial to be able to move the car even with the do…

This seems surprising to me. This is the sort of feature that I could easily see being controlled by the dealer, via 'coding' (effectively just changing config settings via the OBD2 port). It's a fairly easy process that anyone can do at home with a specialty phone app and a bluetooth OBD2 adapter. Though working with BMW as a third party might be troublesome if they didn't make this a configurable setting.

Re: BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine, for Driving Through Gunfire and Grenades

#29

I ran into an old diplomat BMW 7-series in the junkyard in the 90s and that thing was so cool. It had a gun holster in the rear arm rest, like 2" thick windows, probably weighed like 7,000lb from all the armor and everything. Which has me thinking, all this is cool, but the EV portion and all that weight just feels like you'll be a heavily armored sitting duck if you can't get away quick enough and the battery runs o…

Many cars like this have their own private jet to deliver it where it is to be used. You'll see many such cases around any major environmental conference.

I would bet money that this is exceedingly rare. You'd probably have to have a 767 or larger for this to make sense, and only a tiny fraction of private jets are this large. And then it would still have to be extensively modified to be able to fit a car. Not saying it never happens, I'm sure there's some oil prince or oligarch with a 787 that has a garage, but "many cars like this" is likely a huge stretch. Happy to be proven wrong.

Now, do some people who buy cars like this have them shipped via cargo plane to wherever they're needed? That's slightly more believable, but I bet it's still very uncommon.

Re: BMW's Ultimate Driving Machine, for Driving Through Gunfire and Grenades

#30

Interesting read on the BMW 7 series Protection vehicle. Here's a tidbit from the field: I've heard, through the grapevine, about a team responsible for the safety of a certain high-profile individual (no names mentioned, of course ). About a year ago, they made a strategic shift away from BMWs as protection vehicles. Why? Because in emergency escape scenarios, it's crucial to be able to move the car even with the do…

It's not luxury only. Any modern car with an automatic that is controlled by wire will do that.

Start car, leave door open, let go of brake and it'll jump in Park. Safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Yelchin#Death his death would've been prevented if the feature was implemented earlier.

But, knowing it's a BMW, it probably can be disabled. And it actually still works when you have your seatbelt on (as proof of being in control of the vehicle).

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