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After seeing this thread come alive again, I found myself thinking a little more about the issue than I generally do anymore. I realized that I really like the way the car decelerates in the sport-sport (or sport sharp, I think they called it in my first gen X1) mode. The aggressive downshifting and accompanying growl doesn't feel too jarring and it's kinda fun, actually. It makes the car feel spirited and signals it's ready for fun. It feels fine whether you're exiting the freeway or just running between stops in town. Most importantly, it seems to mostly solve the issue we're discussing as it's always looking to downshift so as to be instantly ready for throttle input. But, as others have mentioned, the mode holds it's upshifts too long, at least for around town driving. If I'm in that mode, half the time I think I hit a paddle shifter by mistake and it's holding the gear until I manually select the next. It's just too jolting for anything but focused driving (preferably with tight hairpins, not stop and go). So, if I could go into the iDrive and simply pair the downshifting from one mode with the upshifting of another, it'd be perfect for how I want it to behave most of the time and right from start-up. In fact, I'd be willing to pay a handsome sum to Dinan, Cobb, or any other reputable tuner to just make this change. I'm fine with the power in this car and, in fact, as much as I love to drive fast, I've never bothered to launch it or even take it to its limits. It has plenty for me as is, which is pretty unusual (haha). The other thing I realized is that BMW ain't fixing this issue, which is a bummer. I had hopes a year ago that they'd start to hear about this, realize that it was a simple fix that would make certain enthusiast owners happy, and roll it out on an as-requested basis or something. No luck. So, although I was initially not very high on the pedal tuner option, it does seem like the kind of simple mod that could help make daily driving a bit more satisfying. I intend to revisit this forum over the holidays and check out the instillation posts for the pedal tuner (thanks in advance to those that shared earlier). This car is such a cool unicorn and so having it be so close to great, but not quite there, is frustrating...
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