KwS

Rear bumper is missing its lower valance, makes the "custom exhaust" look even weirder Thats the same car in those photos too I'd buy that for $20k in a heartbeat, but no way is it worth $35k in that state. Poor thing.

Love the look of your wagon. So good I also appreciate the effort you went to to both make the headers work, and document the shambles they are out of the box

Probably looked at it and mistook the shitty body lines to be accident damage related...

Bent front plate probably tells a story too. Is it just me, or is the interior wearing pretty badly for 100,000km? All the touch points around the driver are worn, shiny or scuffed

Im also curious, if the rego lapsed, why have the plates been handed in/removed? Theres no need to do that

Talk to a local radiator repair shop. They can usually clean the inside of tanks out and treat the inside

Real sick of dealers making zero effort and trying to make maximum profit. Particularly the "high end" dealers like that one, there is no excuse. Also, id pay a premium for an E39 M5 over an E60... they arent even in the same league.

I guess that comes down to who before you, owned it longer than the required threshold and transferred the entitlement. if no one has, its probably still with the owner that got the plates 20 years ago. I bet there are a lot of cars out there with plates that arent owned by the owner of the car, since anything thats been made "euro" etc but still govt issue digits is technically now a personalised plate and cars get sold with those regularly.

IIRC the vehicle has to be in your ownership for something like 6 months, before you can apply to have the ownership of the plates transferred to you. Its nothing to do with how long they've been on the vehicle. Personalised plates are owned separately to the vehicle, since you can transfer them between vehicles and can keep them for life. BTW, you've already missed the cutoff for buying black/silver plates, that was the end of Oct. If you buy them now you can only get them in black with white text, unless you already applied for the entitlement to have black/silver made (before Nov), in which case you have until the end of Nov to have them made.

I guess that explains why the panel gaps in the front are on the piss. Just look at the lines around the RH front corner... I'd want a clean history for that sort of money.

I was surprised to read they are a twin turbo V6.... how did they manage to make that sound so bad? Its a real weird sound, not like a V6.

Its all about warranty claims.

Jesus, if my car burnt a litre every thousand ks I'd scrap it. You'd need to top it up a a couple of sumps worth of oil between changes!

If its "burning oil" its not just magically turning it into clean air, unless you mean its leaking it and burning externally (which is also a big possibility with those engines). I hate the be the bad news bear, but those engines are well known to just be junk. Search this forum and its been brought up countless times. It wasnt a high point for BMW. The V8s of that era were kinda trash too and riddled with serious issues. In comparison, their 6 cylinder engines, although not as reliable as the older ones, were damn near bullet proof in comparison. Unless you're specifically wedded to that car, if its going as good as it can, i'd probably try to sell it.

Congratulations, you have discovered another extremely common trait of those engines. Its easy to tell what engine is in that generation of BMW when they pull away from an intersection. If it leaves a cloud of blue smoke, its a 4 cylinder.