NZ BMW

You’re right, once the depreciation flattens out, you’re ahead. Personally I have no interest in holding a car much longer than 4 or maybe 5 years max so it’s a choice to turn them over. I wonder if there is an inflection point? For example if you keep a car for 30 years do you reach a point where you start to loose again. Personally I see cars as a liability to be minimised, within reason. I can hand on heart say I’ve never traded or sold a car with tyres, brakes etc that I wouldn’t be happy to drive on, or which wasn’t serviced well. But if I know I’m going to get rid of my BMW at circa 100ks I’m not going to rebuild the cooling system if I don’t have to, why would I? No one will pay me extra for it and most people buying it won’t value (pay me) it.

The requirements are that you service the engine every 10,000km and the transmission every 30,000km and carry out recommended work. So if your mechanic writes on your invoice that you should change the diff fluid then you have to in order to maintain your insurance. Therefore the incentive is to not do that. Neither is there anything in there about changing the coolant at the recommended interval. Although of your mechanic is worth his salt they should at least test the condition of that during each service and recommend replacement.

I didn’t say that at all, it incentivises me not to, I will still do it because like you I tend to do a bit extra, in fact I did the transmission at 80,000kms. The logic is perfectly reasonable - I tend to keep my cars for 3-4 years always under warranty and generally from 70/80-100/120kms. If your insurance largely removes the risk of the cost of potential failure why would a person responding to incentives spend any money above what is required to satisfy their insurance requirements? You might find that personally offensive to your sensibilities but that’s how a lot of people think. When I trade or sell the car I doubt I’ll be able to recoup any of that additional cost either. The numbers don’t make sense for people to maintain their vehicles to that level so hardly anyone does.

I was thinking the other day, I should really change all the oil in my diff and transfer case etc. however, my MBI actually incentivises me to NOT do this. There’s not requirement and the excess is not that much greater than the cost of service.

Care to elaborate? You can’t just drop that hand grenade in there and leave us all hanging!

Good to hear a recommendation on the dealer from a couple of people! That car looks great, guy in my office has one in silver - they are a seriously nice bit of kit.

Let’s just hope it wasn’t based on a common technology platform with the BMW powered Range Rover...

I actually don’t mind the blue interior trim - also notice to the right of the steering wheel it has some sort of adjustable ride height, didn’t know that was an option on the X5.

I think this would look cool on a track car. I guess the new owner can remove that should they wish. I always find this kind of stuff interesting, if you consider who is likely to pay top dollar for a very low mileage 320i I can’t imagine it’s anyone who wants an extra side of BMW M stripes. This will sit for a while I think.

A couple of years ago I was trapped in Buffalo of all places trying to leave the US. The locals informed me it was the coldest winter for many years and everyone had ‘snow rage’

Personally I would have liked to have seen more in-depth info and comparison with the Rimac.

Exactly, you need to take it for what it is - an interesting custom build.

I think he is 100% right on the cooling system, they seem more delicate than other European cars I’ve owned. BMW seems to live closer to the bleeding edge of things than say Toyota. You pay for that in reliability ratings but you tend to make up for that in driving dynamics. Certainly other makes have issues. Honda, if I recall correctly is a shocker with transmissions in a number of their models.

Good ole Facebook, where all the keyboard warriors come out to throw shade at something they could never buy... it’s a cool car. If it’s over priced the seller will have to meet the market. In the meantime, I’m just happy to see the pictures and be happy for whomever will buy it!

Five wiper stalks... I always wonder how some things like glove boxes and the edges of gauges etc get damaged in cars. Some people just don’t seem to care about their things and take care. Good luck, sad to see a special car end up like this.

Good to hear it’s rumning again. Are the pumps on these things relatively easy to access? Could have been worse - my E39’s pump died in traffic in Auckland... for a couple of days I had a noise which I thought was a noisy pulley, worst part was it was booked in to get looked at later in the week.

Finally fixed my broken parking brake switch. Replaced it with one that has the ‘auto-hold’ feature, works like a charm.

Sorry - posted in wrong thread...

It’s a nice car but given you can get the next model sedan M5 for the same or slightly less you’d have to really love it. Likewise with the other M5 wagon on there, that extra 35K is a lot of petrol money...

Lots of these seem to come up in maroon. Would love to see more in silver, black, white and BMW blue.

As I understand it more than the E53 is affected when it comes to the X5 range. For example my E70 which is booked in to have both driver and passenger bags replaced... So if you want to be pedantic, perhaps I should have said that it only shows three chassis numbers...

Kinda interesting how the above link shows only three models - I thought it was much wider than that?

I bought my last set of wipers from Auckland BMW they were in the region of $120.

My bloody parking brake button broke off in my hand over the weekend. What the....?! Ordered a new one for $100, I can think of far better ways to spend that money.

That’s all true, however for the sake of a few dollars I’d almost prefer to have it fixed myself. I’ve had a couple of dealers do small fixes on cars and it’s almost always the cheapest and nastiest job possible. That might be different if it’s the official main BMW dealer selling you the car but I suspect most of us are buying from others.