Probably would be a great idea, especially if it was government regulated like safety features are today in cars. What if someone initiated it remotely when an M3 was sitting at a red light and launched them into the highway?

Of course we need a trusted computing base. Otherwise, how can you really ever be sure of the odometer reading?

I had no idea this was considered to be an undocumented feature. And having read the article, I still don't understand why anyone would think that.

It's not an easter egg - it's a feature. I've seen it mentioned a few times in car magazines here in the UK, and it has never been suggested that this is anything other than simply being one of the things that the SMG box does. Just like it double declutches and blips the throttle for you on a downchange. It's just one of the things it is supposed to do.

It makes sense too, when you consider that the principal reason for SMG boxes at the moment is for the associations with motorsport. (They're a lot less fun to drive than the manual box, so if you're in the market for an M3 in the first place, they're a strange thing to opt for. They offer a marginal performance benefit, but unless you race, the loss in driver involvement just isn't worth the fractional improvement in performance.) BMW is a Formula 1 sponsor and engine provider, and all F1 cars have sequential boxes. Until fairly recently, they all had launch control features like this too. So it's hardly surprising that they built in a launch control feature. The brochures for the M3 in the UK make the connection between Formula 1 and the SMG box explicitly.

This is *not* an easter egg. It's a feature designed in deliberately as an integral part of the SMG package. The fact that it's undocumented is down to either legal, PR, or warranty reasons. You should be pleased that they chose to leave it in, rather than risk compromising the system by removing the feature late in the design process.

Open Source. Manufacturers make their money from the hardware, from the entire package - the software itself is probably not all that complicated.

I agree this is not an Easter Egg, its actually called 'launch control' and is remarkable good fun ! I cant remeber off the top of my head the exact sequence but basically, put the gear box in manual mode, turn off traction controll and a hidden 6th ('loopy mental') mode becomes available - at this point depress and hold the + or - gear selelctor (cant remember which) and put you foot as far down on the throtle as it will go, the car reves until you release the gear selector and you hold on for dear life :-)

As an SMG M3 owner, I can say that the SMG gear box is as much fun if not more than a manual gearbox, certainly a different experience but when you are careering round corners at 150MPH you do not want to take the hands off the wheel !

...mind you, if you're going round a corner at 150mph would you want to change gear at all?

My (manual) M3 is being delivered a week from today, so I can't test this for sure right now, but can you actually do 150 in anything other than 6th? I might have got my calculations wrong, but going on the documented gear ratios I thought you'd be past the red line by then. So if you get up to 150 you're presumably already in 6th, and changing into 5th will be expensive... :-)

Seriously though, I take your point - mid-corner gear changes are much more of a challenge with a manual box. But I enjoy a challenge. :-)

What it really boils down to is that I test drove the SMG and found it very much not to my taste - I just felt a whole lot less connected than with a clutch and a manual shift. It was the lack of a clutch pedal I disliked more than anything else.