UTMC

Since there is a varied population here with a cumulative background of experience that is staggering i have a question about older BMWs (cages).

It is time to replace my 2003 Chevy Impala.
Not actually a photo of my car but all the blue ones look like this.
Its a horrible car. Not horrible in that it's not reliable and falling apart, or that it costs a fortune to maintain, or that the family doesn't fit in it anymore. We are just sick to death of it. We bought it in 2007 or 08 and have simply replaced oil and wear items.
We have a 318 convertible we are resurrecting that we picked up for $500 and is now a daily driver.

So when the subject of replacing the Impala came up, the idea for a clean used BMW hatched. What I need to know is what 1996-2005 3 or 5-series sedans/wagons should a person avoid at all costs if planning on doing all maintenance themselves?

I'd buy an old 2002, newer than that would be shite.
But I'm weird.

manicles would say go Mercedes.

2002s around here only seem to be owned by collectors who price them as though the are gold-plated.
Mercs are comfy, but the house hold collective doesn't like the older ones styling much.

i've always been partial to the 507, myself

When I met my buddy Mike, he had a nice 2002, a 3.0 liter coupe, and he's the first guy I knew to stick a Ford V8 in a Benz body. He put a 351C in a 240D body, had to cut a couple coils off the front springs to level the car. The gas V8 & C6 weighed less than the diesel four banger. He kept the DIESEL badges, put a quiet exhaust on, it was a total sleeper!

The reason I met him was because he had a Porsche 930 in his front yard, and I was the mailman. I couldn't not knock on his door to ask him about it.

The only BMW I've owned was a 1984 528i, from 1990-92. Didn't have a single problem with it. That was in Germany, but don't think that makes any difference. Would have kept it, but it was German spec and to bring it to the US would've cost me a pretty penny to upgrade it to US spec.

GG- if the four banger in the convertible ever grenades the plan is to replace it with a late model ls engine and six speed. Pretty common swap nowadays it seems, a couple places even make mounts and harnesses fir that.

12ci wrote:i've always been partial to the 507, myself

If I could afford that one the question wouldn't be which old Beemer to buy but which one in the garage to drive today...
Also,I need four seats.

I've heard about a specific weakness of head gaskets on inline 6, but that might be on older models. When speaking about cars, I'm like the muslim calendar, 500 hundred years behind and I don't know crap about anything since 1989. The older models with no TC are a handful to handle on wet roads but that probably doesn't scare you much.

talking 80's euro cars, when i lived over there i knew a number of cab drivers. They like fast and reliable. Volvo's were bottom feeders, Fords were considered ok, beemers they didn't even use because they broke down too much and mercedes was the dominant cab brand by far. I never owned a bmw, but i did lust after a 633csi for awhile. I did know lots of peeps who did own beemers and they all had frequent issues with them compared to those with fords & opels, mercs and even veedubs, sort of bearing out the taxi industry's findings in part at least.

Yeah, when I see the ones for sale like this. I get awfully tempted just to try one out and see how pricey maintenance and repairs are firsthand.
On the 318 I have everyone said "It needs too much work and the parts will eat you alive". While in reality I've already put on a new top, struts, brakes, lots of interior parts (an E36 curse apparently), and almost all the suspension bushings so far and I'm still barely into it for $2k including the purchase price. Not counting my time of course as working on things I don't HAVE to have running is something I find rather calming and helps get my head straight.

[sledit] Just offhand brake rotors on the Merc are $10 higher than the (older) beemer, but the water pump is three times the price. Comparing with a similar Year and model Beemer and the price differences are still the same. Wheel bearings on all three are about the same. I just use those as they are the most common things I've had to change on older cars. A cursory search on complete used drivetrains says they are all in the same ballpark (except the 318 since some folks just give away the four cylinders when they do a swap). Great now I have to research Merc too... LOL! [/sledit]

as the local correspond, I'd add that old opel just never die (I'm on the look out for a 1985 3.0L myself right now, funny considering the bad reputation of any other american GM product ), when they reach 500.000km, older merc are sent to africa or middle east where they live another 9 lifes (with 3 body pre 90's toyota's) but parts are expensive if you cannot build them yourself out of a tin can, ford lost this reliability reputation in the late 80's, and newer VW's are now considered overpriced crap. the reason BMW probably never achieved this reputation is probably cheap price, poor handling on wet road (380 days a year here) and insufficient maintenance by ghetto racers who sent most of them wrapped around a tree somewhere around a rainy road.

So you can bring the family to the coast

Rockin! But maybe not what I had in mind...

xtian wrote:as the local correspond, I'd add that old opel just never die (I'm on the look out for a 1985 3.0L myself right now, funny considering the bad reputation of any other american GM product )

Ha! So true. The best car I had over there was a Opel Ascona from somewhere in the early 70's i think. Thing was indestructible. I remember taking it for a trip through a frozen plowed field about this time of year, skipping sideways over the furrows after the adjacent icy road bid us adieu. And then, drove it *back* on the road and away we went to work. :sigh: car memories...

A word of caution: in the late 90s, Opel got a ... less than good reputation for reliability.
Anyone I know pimping around in an Opel from that era had no great problems and issues I'm aware of, my parents just sold their 15 year old Vectra which did have some kinks for a fairly reasonable sum, considering the mileage and all. It seem that, truly, old Opels never dies. They used to have a good reputation for reliability and being cheap to fix, I was told it used to be that any hose under an Opel's bonnet was held on with the same kind of cheap hose-clamp you could, just like the hose itself, get at the hardware store for pennies. They stopped doing that in the 90s, so repairs got a little more costly. And their build quality declined.
If an Opel of that era gets as far as being properly "old", it was put together right and had any kinks ironed out so it, in all likelihood, a truly robust vehicle.

As far as the build quality goes ... when I was in engineering school, we toured the local Opel plant once. A fellow student saw something. I cannot vouch for it, but she said she saw how the indicator lenses were being put in. The guy who bolted them in was handed them by another guy ... who's job it was to stand there with a fucking Dremel and remove a little plastic knob from each lens he pulled out of the bin of lenses in front of him. On every single lens.
Story is that, in the 90s, GM decided to get really involved up-close and personal in managing Opel, introducing American management techniques and even entire models designed in the US. Didn't go very well for Opel. They eventually even had to discontinue the Omega model line entirely. Not because they were no good, the expert opinion in the media was that, technologically, it was just as good as any Audi or large VW. But the design and marketing were so spot-on, no one bought it, so they had to re-brand the whole model line as the Insignia. They managed to scrape by in the big old crisis of recent years, so it did come as a little surprise that the third time GM announced they'd close the Opel plant in my town, it would be the time they really meant it - after the crisis was over and GM was on it's way up again. The plant is turning 50 this year. There are people in this town who started working there when they got out of school at 16 and have retired, at the regular retirement age, never having worked anywhere else. Last time they threatened closure, there was a big public outcry, protest marches, I was one of 50k people (in a town of 390k) who came out on a single day, the unions managed to convince GM to sign a legally binding agreement to keep the plant running till 2015. So, on December 31, when the last shift of the day clocks out, they pull the plugs on all assembly lines. The parts-distribution center will keep going, but only one year longer. GM won't let any enticement make them even consider reconsidering. At one point last year, they threatened shutting down in the summer of 2014 and dared the unions to take them to court, just so they could make the deals that would have them keep the distribution center open a little more favorable. There are "only" 3000 people still working there (used to be 20k), but still. You come from here, you grew up in the certainty that Opel is the bestest car, you grew up loving Opel. So I'm less than enthusiastic about anything GM, currently.

I remember my dad working on someone's old Opel they brought back from someplace that has semaphores instead of blinkers.
Like these -
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2707m26q_Q[/media]

Opel from the late 90's ? I told you, I didn't even know they still made cars in the 90's, but there is one strong possibility that they turned to shit, after all, it's around that era that GM began to rebadge them as cadillac's. Still, when I browse the ads for cars older than 1989 (I can't afford taxes unless it's officially an oldtimer), a vast majority of them are original opel's. a handful of german ford's, a couple of exotic detroit steel, the rest are "good restoration project", mainly rusted bodies with stalked engines. Considering that most mercs, beemers and toys left for sunny africa or eastern countries.

Other than a very few specific cars, Opels haven't been sold in America since the 1970s, when Buick dealers sold a few. The exceptions were the mediocre Cadillac Catera back in the 90s and a few Astra hatchbacks with buzzy engines and questionable ergonomics sold as Saturns as the division was headed for oblivion. Both were notable sales failures. AFAIK, the only Opel design currently being sold here is the Buick Verano, also not a big seller.

I would personally avoid any 1996 BMW, as they had problems with OBD2 compliance for emissions testing regarding "failure for readiness" in at least some models. Any such car basically couldn't pass emissions testing after an emissions-related repair - sometimes for months and thousands of miles of driving time. I had a nightmare experience with this happening on a customer's 1996 750iL that took months to pass smog testing while racking up tickets for expired stickers even though the car had been repaired and qualified for a waiver.

You'll also want to do some research on the sulfur-related engine problems some V8 models had, where the cylinder plating (nikasil?) of some years 5 and 7 series cars was eaten away. BMW goodwilled a lot of engine replacements on those cars but some low mileage examples might still have the original, crap engines in them.

Generally speaking, the bigger the engine and the newer the car, the more complicated the cars get and the more expensive the repairs and maintenance tends to be.