Having the production number is a curse.
It's a curse because the production number along with MINI's My Garage give the illusion that you can actually track the progress of your MINI's construction. Many customers find themselves visiting that website many times a day in the futile hope something will change.
Some of those hopeful customers are disappointed by seeing their car's progress stall. Others even see their car's progress regress. There are a few happy customers who are surprised to find their MINIs arriving long before the site would have led them to expect. They, too, are unhappy with MINI's faulty tracking system. And why can you call MINI to sometimes get better information than is available online? Who updates the website anyway?
Then there's the curse of learning on which boat your MINI is traveling across the ocean...should you spend the money to obtain its exact satellite-updated location or just wait for it to get close to shore when the location info is free?
I guess I sound like Debbie Downer here. My SE was worth my 51-week wait. Fortunately, half of that post-order waiting was before SE production began, so I didn't spend those early days refreshing my browser window over and over.