The bit the gets me more than the sale price is servicing.
BMWs have a terrible record for needing expensive repairs.
I know you shouldn’t rely on anecdote, but it seems I do.
The bit the gets me more than the sale price is servicing.
BMWs have a terrible record for needing expensive repairs.
I know you shouldn’t rely on anecdote, but it seems I do.
The only way I would buy a BMW is if it were an EV. I’m just not brave (or rich) enough to buy their ICEs.
The BMW inline 6 were the best engines ever. Their inline 4 and other are a strong contender for the worst engines ever.
I assume you’re talking about the n52 vs n20. I’ve had both engines as daily drivers, and they’re both fine. The n20 has a bad rap due to early models failing from a timing chain guides breaking.
I miss my E39 530 every time I drive. My next 90s Jag is also going to be a straight-six; the V12 is glorious but heavy.
They suffer from some of the same problem your likely modern fridge does, and then kick it up two notches.
In the name of "safety", they have made design decisions such as integrating fuses directly into the very large and expensive control boards and making them non-replacable. Just in case this wasn't enough, they also tend to blow an OTP so that in the event that you have the know how to replace the fuses anyways, nothing will work. Naturally you also cannot just swap in a replacement board, as it needs to go through the same pairing process to the ECU as things like the car doors, which in most cases requires an active certificate/license on the ecu programmer that only dealerships/oem have.
This is a company intentionally making sure EVs didn’t erode service revenues
Simpler != more reliable. Electronics fail quite often too. Just ask SSDs.
Also new EVs fail often too due to being cost cut to the extreme with the "move fast and break things".
In theory they should be, but EVs also tend to be more computerised, proprietary and locked down than ICE cars, so in practice I think it's not as simple as that.
For example there was that case of the car that needed an entire new sealed €5k battery controller because it was in a minor crash and blew a fuse.
My garage charges 50% more for labour on EVs. I'm sure part of that is price discrimination but I bet part is also because working on them is more difficult. I would not be surprised if they need to pay more for access to the manufacturer's diagnostic tools too, which are becoming increasingly required.
[dead]
If you take care of the car it’s just brake pads, tires, rotors. Pads and rotors are really simple to DIY. Tires are more expensive than like… an Elantra, but if you’re buying a 60k car you can afford 1.2k in tires… otherwise don’t buy the car.
If you get into an accident or let the bmw get into disrepair via neglect, yeah it’s not cheap to clean up. Body work is expensive on any car though, and I don’t have sympathy for people who own higher-end cars and don’t take care of them, they deserve to pay the price for it.
It's more than that though. Any repairs due to wear and tear or whatever, ends up being really expensive. Although you can probably reduce the costs a bit if you get the non-branded OEM part or potentially the same part from another manufacturer (e.g. the toyota supra uses a lot of bmw parts so if the toyota part might be cheaper than the same bmw part).
That was my whole point actually, the wear and tear is really minimal if you get regular oil changes. Things don’t just break and need replacing. Tires, rotors, brakes, those wear out. The tires are not cheap, rotors and pads aren’t crazy expensive and super easy to DIY.
What other wear and tear things are expensive?
Owned a BMW. Had the audacity to use non-BMW windshield washer fluid. The fluid sensor broke; because in a BMW it’s a fancy sensor that is only compatible with specific washing fluids. Sums up my experience with that car. It was nice to sit in, though.
After 22 years, my z4 has needed batteries and a starter.
Recently, there was a problem with the engine misfiring but it was $200.
LA, California
If you had bought a 7 or 5 Series at that time, you would not have had that experience. The 2001 7 Series had something like a 25% roadside breakdown rate.
25% every journey, or 25% over the lifetime of the car? Neither seems really believable but I don't understand how else you would measure this.
25% of cars. It was... not good.
So like... One in four cars would break down at the side of the road before it was otherwise EOL? One roadside breakdown every 800,000 miles or so? That really doesn't sound bad.
[dead]
Mostly just tires and minor maintenance. You're unlikely to need pad and rotor replacements unless you're driving as if you were on a racetrack every single day.
With daily EV driving you have the opposite problem - regen means you rarely, if ever, actually activate the brakes, so you get rust on them that you need to clean out.