[RobUK]

There's obviously a small delay in your request hitting the BMW servers, but how it gets to the car from there I don't know. I'm guessing that either the request is 'pushed' to the car, or the car will poll the BMW service at regular intervals, and for either method there's a cost/efficiency implication.

The Google local search is the best bit of BMW Remote IMHO. It's much quicker than using the iDrive interface, plus you can do stuff like <pub-name> , <town> (while the g/f is driving)