Ehi guys, thanks for your help.
Some further research point to the fact that cars with rear self leveling are 10mm higher in the rear than car's without.
I'll pull the more accurate doc from Rheingold tonight, but in the meantime, here's my source ->
http://tis.bmwcats.com/doc1126535/
I took a more accurate measure of my rear hitch which comes out to 14.7mm -> it's sort of hard to really measure "the center" of the hitch so I measured at the higher lip, the lower lip and took the half-sum.
Bottom line is that if in fact the cars with self leveling are 10mm higher, the measure taken by
absentmathis lines up with mine, particularly when you factor in the offset of the hitch (where we're measuring) from the wheel (where the 10mm difference from BMW is calculated)
For a second I couldn't stop thinking that somehow my car was bent somewhere...