The secret BMW driving course that money can’t buy
Select customers are invited to take up the BMW White Glove Experience. And it isn’t even meant for them
[SINGAPORE] Andi McCann gestures me over to the passenger compartment of a brand new BMW 735i (starting price: a modest S$613,888 with Certificate of Entitlement) and asks if I can spot if anything is amiss. I squint at it. It looks fine to me. But McCann, who trains chauffeurs for the world’s wealthiest families, spots what I can’t: a seatbelt is ever so slightly twisted.
“That looks like someone’s already been in there,” he explains, untwisting it with a flick. Immediately, inexplicably, it looks much better. When a chauffeur prepares a car, it should look box fresh, he explains. Otherwise, it’s like entering your hotel suite for the first time and seeing a handprint on the pillow.
I feel like I’ve flunked an exam, but mercifully there are no actual tests in the White Glove Experience, BMW’s exclusive chauffeur training programme.
McCann runs the course for BMW as a sort of roving ambassador and independent contractor, having developed it from the Rolls-Royce chauffeur academy that dates back to 1910, nearly a century before BMW bought the storied British brand.
Sir Henry Royce set up the school at the dawn of motoring when a household’s butler was expected to switch from tending horses to coaxing life out of what were then strange, new-fangled mechanical contraptions.
McCann, who seems to have an anecdote for everything, explains that “chauffeur” originally referred to the person stoking the heat for a steam engine, and thereby supplying the power. He shows me a report card he unearthed from the Rolls-Royce academy belonging to a student of such middling ability that the company decided to refund the £10 fee and send the poor man on his way.
McCann was in Singapore in November to spend three days with each of the two BMW dealers here, running 1.5-hour sessions at a go.
To avoid making the affair sound like a dreary day in the classroom, he decided to call the course the “White Glove Experience”, evoking a sense of meticulous attention to detail – the sort of detail that means knowing that non-vintage champagne should be served at 6 degrees Celsius while vintage gets served at 11 deg C, for example.
Nothing is too basic to work on. When I demonstrate how I typically open a car door for my wife, McCann informs me that it takes me seven awkward movements to do it. With a quick choreography lesson, he shows me a smooth, elegant way that involves one fluid motion, so I no longer look like I’m wrestling with the door.
Other tips are pure practicality. Don’t pull up too close to the kerb or you create a trip hazard. And for the love of luxury, never tilt the rear-view mirror to make eye contact with your passenger. That’s a privacy violation masquerading as attentiveness.
McCann is also a certified kinesiologist – essentially a specialist in how the body moves – which explains his fixation on posture, muscle tension and the way a tiny change in seating angle can unlock smoother, more effortless driving.
In fact, he claims even experienced drivers operate at a disadvantage without realising it, like being forced to drive a rental car for days before someone tells you the seat actually adjusts.
He reckons he can make a “very good and positive change” in someone’s driving almost immediately, because it’s often just one switch that needs flipping. In fact, even ex-police drivers, objectively skilled behind the wheel, are often his most challenging students.
They’re “good drivers but not very adaptable,” he says. When it comes to the soft skills of balancing a car for passenger comfort or mastering etiquette, “they require more work”.
Presumably, the average tycoon would appreciate having an above-average chauffeur, but there is a catch: the White Glove Experience is strictly by invitation only. No amount of money will secure a seat in the course, which is ironic because BMW doesn’t charge the customer for it.
It’s up to dealers to invite their best customers to send the help along (although some customers do attend the course themselves). “You can’t buy your way in,” McCann says. “When you tell billionaires that, they want it even more.”
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