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I don't think that there should always be suspicion..I own a 2005 Camry and it just hit 26,000 miles and is in perfect condition with only a couple of scratches on the paint. I work from my home and I don't drive that much.
FWIW, low miles can be just as much of an issue as excessive miles if maintenance was not properly done. If this was me, beyond having the car checked out by a mechanic, I would also want to see the available service history to see how the car has been maintained. Tires were mentioned and that is a good place to look. The original tires should have been replaced about 2 or 3 years ago simply do to age. Overall, it can either be a great buy, or could be a poorly maintained car that still looks new. Only way to tell is to check it out.
I don't think I could claim 200,000 miles of good running on any of these cars, even with 3,000 mile oil change intervals ... and frequent air and fuel filter replacements. While you can certainly keep one of these cars in nice condition on the road for well over 200,000 miles, the cost per mile won't be inexpensive with the needed repairs/upkeep ...
I don't know what's in the water up there, but there are over 35 12-15year old 7s in my club alone, and only one has been a problem (but it was bought in an abused state and the owner thinks that it should be a pristine new example)
As I just said, my kids' 325i has 245k on it now, and it's his daily driver. The repairs have ben cheap and able to be done with hand tools by an 18 year old in his grandma's driveway. I know youre going to go on about how hard they "really" are to DIY, but that's typical of a tech who makes money off of people that don't so you have a vested intertest in promoting the myth. My own car is only 15k miles fmo hitting 200,000 on teh original transmission, and a number of fellow club members are over that.
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While another poster has asserted that these cars don't have to be expensive to keep on the road ... that's achieved only by being a D-I-Y'er who does all of his own work and shops the extensive on-line marketplace for the consumable and hard parts.
Why would you buy ANY older car wihtout making the choice to do that at least enoguh to know what's going on if you have to take it in? If you're at the mercy of a tech to tell you what's wrong, you're gonna get nailed even if you drive a Honda. In that case, it's a choice to be screwed and not an indictment of the car itself.
BTW, I also buy parts at the local BMW dealer, because with the BMW CLub of America discount, I can save 20% (bringing a lot of parts down to online prices). Again, anyone looking at buying one of these without doing that is setting themselves up for failure.
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Even at that, if they run in to a problem requiring the diagnostics, they're not going to be able to deal with it unless they want to just throw parts at the problem. Otherwise, they're stuck with heading to a dealership or an independent with the capability to hook up and diagnose.
Not really the case these days, but whatever. I've never taken mine to a dealership to diagnose anything, with the exception of letting them do the AC recharge and pressure test, which was cheap.
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Even today, it's a search to find out what some of the trouble codes are ....
Actually, it's not, with a $150 peake tool and an OBDII reader, and copius amnounts of information on the web. For example, at places like www.e38.org
Yes, if you don't know what your'e doing and have the dealer do everything for you, you might end up with some serious expenses. but you seem to be of the opinion that it WILL cost you to keep running and WILL fail regularly, while I'm of the opinion that that's not true. "Might" =/= "will."
And all I have to do to prove MY argument is point to my car. Since it exists, your argument is false.
Thanks everyone for your perspective. I have to admit I am a bit..okay..overly cautious about buying a BMW even though I want one. Badly. I have read so many articles of people's experiences and generally it appears most people love the cars but about half (from the websites) say they break often. Not so much major components (although have read some nightmare stories) but more with window regulators, water pumps and so forth. I have started threads before about bimmers and everyone was kind of enough to add their input. I guess I am still on the fence and also to obtain one in my price range puts me in an older model with high mileage most of the time. Cars are over priced where I live so looking out of state provides much better buys. So I saw this older one with very low miles and got excited but then I was thinking, Okay what is wrong with it?
I am the car buff where my husband is really not unless it is a Jeep. He restored an older jeep years ago but obviously there are major differences in the mechanicals between the two. I have shown him articles that others have given me links for, where to buy parts, most common repairs and so forth and he didn't seem to worried. But my husband is the type of guy that doesn't worry about stuff till it hits the fan. I worry for the both of us. Also I have to admit, it would really suck talking him into a bimmer and then it ending up being a nightmare that he has to fix all the time or bleeds the budget every month. Of course we would not buy a car sight unseen or not have someone experienced look at it first. I know a friend of a friend that owns a 2001 3 series. He loves the car but admitted he has had the car fixed several times in the past 6 months. The latest issue is he went to start it last week and it won't even turn over. His mechanic that is not that experienced in BMW's admitted he has no idea what is wrong with it, so it has been at a foreign auto shop since then. Meh...maybe I should just buy a Honda.
I don't think that there should always be suspicion..I own a 2005 Camry and it just hit 26,000 miles and is in perfect condition with only a couple of scratches on the paint. I work from my home and I don't drive that much.
Yes. I've worked from home for years and years and my cars are very low mileage. Right now I've got a 2007 that just hit 18,000. I'm freakish about getting all the maintenance done on time. Just a couple of small dings from a freak hail storm on this one.
Every time I sell a car people are suspicious. I've also got neighbors asking me when I'm going to sell because they know they're going to get a car in great shape.
BMWs have an odometer tamper light. If the mileage on the cluster is in disagreement when the mileage on the ECU and key, then it will trip the light on the cluster.
Lower miles don't really mean anything IMO. Just because it only has 30,000 miles dosn't mean its oil seals wont leak due to age.
I don't know what's in the water up there, but there are over 35 12-15year old 7s in my club alone, and only one has been a problem (but it was bought in an abused state and the owner thinks that it should be a pristine new example)
As I just said, my kids' 325i has 245k on it now, and it's his daily driver. The repairs have ben cheap and able to be done with hand tools by an 18 year old in his grandma's driveway. I know youre going to go on about how hard they "really" are to DIY, but that's typical of a tech who makes money off of people that don't so you have a vested intertest in promoting the myth. My own car is only 15k miles fmo hitting 200,000 on teh original transmission, and a number of fellow club members are over that.
OK, let's see if we can track down why these cars have such a different history in your area than in mine ...
1) Actually, there is something very different in the water here ... we have extremely hard water with a high mineral content. Most shops ... including the dealerships ... use the tap water for coolant dilution, which is essentially corrosive in the aluminum alloys used in the blocks, heads, radiators, and other items in these cars. BMW's (and MB's) were especially susceptible to "plating" metal transfer throughout the heater cores and radiators since the 1980's ... the metallurgy of the electrical paths wasn't well thought out. A lot of radiators simply didn't transfer heat after a number years/miles in service. So an already marginal cooling system capacity, which had very little excess ability, lead to a lot of overheated or high temp running motors ... Which lead to another serious issue here:
2) In the Rocky Mountain Region, and specifically the Front Range of Colorado we are based at a higher altitude, by far ... then the East Coast of the USA. At 5,280' for Denver ... and the close proximity of serious mountain climbs, we have to work our cars harder than you'll ever do. For example, if I go from Denver to Vail (which I did almost every week for many years of the 70's-80's-90's decades) ... out of an approximately 2 hour trip, I'll spend over 1 hour or so in hard climbs up mountain passes. There's the grade out of Denver past Genessee, than up the hill past Idaho Springs, then up to Georgetown, than over the Eisenhower tunnel at over 11,100', and then the long grade past Copper Mountain to the top of Vail pass elev 10,617' and down to Vail at approx 8,500'. Much of that road is 65 mph posted, and it's not unusual on clear driving condition days to have a lot of traffic doing 70-85 mph on I-70.
You do have such severe climbs of this type of grade and duration in MD, don't you? OH, I forgot ... you're in the sea level flatlands, where the posted top speed in the state is what, 65 mph? It's 75 mph on most of our highways. Regionally, we have a lot of wide open spaces where driving 75 mph + for hours on end is not unusual ... when I head to SLC, I'm thinking in terms of needed fuel stops to make the trip, cruising at 75-80 mph for all those hours. Do you have anywhere in your part of the country where you drive at these speeds for hours on end without interruption? I don't think so.
3) We have wide temperature fluctuations. It's not unusual to see 40-50 (or even more) degree temperature shifts during a day's cycle ... not including the overnight drop ... as fronts move through the area. Even at that, it's not uncommon to see high 90F temps in the foothills and Denver on a summer day, and we have many days in the winter where double digits below zero aren't uncommon. Where I live now, in Wyoming ... it's not uncommon to see stretches of days where the daytime high doesn't reach ZERO F, and drops below that into double digits below zero. The marginal cooling systems of BMW's of up to a few years ago simply could not cope with the higher temperatures and the high altitude air density which didn't cool the motors effectively.
Add in a bunch of road debris ... leaves, bugs, and such common foreign matter (small stones from the road sanding during the winter months acrette in the radiators, too, when slush gets tossed up to the radiator) ... which typically started gathering in a radiator in the area of the aux fan(s), and the reserve cooling capacity of these cars went to a negative situation on a long climb at road speeds at altitude. Compound that with the BTU load of the A/C condensor out front and possibly the automatic transmission cooling, and these cars were highly and frequently susceptible to blowing head gaskets, if not cracking the heads. By the time a driver typically noticed the temp gauge heading to the high end of normal on a summer day, the hot spots in the head had already started to fail. With the late model alloy block BMW's, the problem has migrated to the head bolt threads, which commonly fail when the motors are run hot ... this is not the result of customer abuse or lack of maintenance, but simply driving the cars at normal road speeds in our ambient conditions.
Given these normal temps in our area, the stress of repeatedly starting a motor from cold temps and thermal cycling is much more severe than you'll ever encounter in a climate where just below zero is really cold ... and typical daytime/nightime averages only swing about 20F. If someone here starts their car in sub-zero temps ... drives a nominal distance to work and parks for the day ... that car will be cold soaked again later that day. I saw the results of this frequently with a lot of worn valve guides (which lead to short life of the valve guide seals) in BMW's (and a lot of loose in the head dropped valve guides in MB's, in addition to the worn guide seals and oil consumption issues). As our winters can last 4-5-6 months of a year, this climate factor is far more severe than you've got in a milder coastal area.
Why would you buy ANY older car wihtout making the choice to do that at least enoguh to know what's going on if you have to take it in? If you're at the mercy of a tech to tell you what's wrong, you're gonna get nailed even if you drive a Honda. In that case, it's a choice to be screwed and not an indictment of the car itself.
Yeah, right ... so everybody who chooses not to D-I-Y is asking for trouble? How 'bout those who are physically unable to work on their cars? or those who don't have a place or tools to work on their cars? or who have no interest, or mechanical apptitude? Are they all idiots? At the price points for used BMW's, they're not giving them away to folks who typically have less than professional incomes.
BTW, I also buy parts at the local BMW dealer, because with the BMW CLub of America discount, I can save 20% (bringing a lot of parts down to online prices). Again, anyone looking at buying one of these without doing that is setting themselves up for failure.
Then you've missed the opportunities to buy OE parts at substantially lower prices through a lot of the importers. But how many average folk really have the time/interest/ability to buy their parts online?
Not really the case these days, but whatever. I've never taken mine to a dealership to diagnose anything, with the exception of letting them do the AC recharge and pressure test, which was cheap.
No, it's not "whatever". BMW was only forced via a successful lawsuit by the independent shops to release a lot of the laptop based diagnostic codes and service information, some of which had already been pirated by their own service techs helping out other shops. Hence, a lot of codes have made it in to the aftermarket, but only for now.
Actually, it's not, with a $150 peake tool and an OBDII reader, and copius amnounts of information on the web. For example, at places like www.e38.org
Enjoy this while you can. BMW is again pursuing controlling the information about their cars and diagnostics by getting away from the shop laptop as the diagnostic tool and keeping all of their proprietary information in-house. The diagnostic connector to their car is merely a means to connect it to the master BMW computer for diagnostics, updates, programming, etc. They're specifically trying to minimize the skills and talents of the shop tech, and they're making it harder than ever for the tech to know what may have even been a problem in a given car ... the tech is simply directed to replace various components without ever knowing why or what the causation of the failure was. Worse still, BMW controls the software in the car and car cure certain problems by reprogramming a computer ... so again, the tech has no knowledge of what failures and problems were corrected.
Yes, if you don't know what your'e doing and have the dealer do everything for you, you might end up with some serious expenses. but you seem to be of the opinion that it WILL cost you to keep running and WILL fail regularly, while I'm of the opinion that that's not true. "Might" =/= "will."
Here again, we'll differ. You still insist that the onus is on the car owner to "know what" they're doing.
My cousin recently purchased a cpo 2008 325Xi from a Baltimore area dealer ... she lives in Towsend. The car needed front brakes shortly after she bought it, which fortunately for her were done under warranty. She was told the cost out of warranty would have been over $600. I saw this coming years ago when BMW first got in to supplying disc rotors that had virtually no excess material on them and would wear down under minimum thickness spec in the service life of the first pads on them. You can't just replace the pads and resurface the rotors anymore ... it's now a matter of replacing expensive consumable parts. Wait until she sees what it's going to cost for tires ....Or if the transmission goes south, dealer price these days around $6,000 installed (and no, my MD PHd cousin isn't going to crawl under the car in her townhouse parking lot and swap the transmission, no matter how hard you think she should be able to as a knowledgeable consumer ... all she wants is a vehicle that gets her from point a to b after she puts the gas in it.)
And all I have to do to prove MY argument is point to my car. Since it exists, your argument is false.
Wow, I'm so impressed with the depth of your extensive knowledge of these cars gleaned from your experience with a couple of cars. It's certainly the basis of establishing the entire car line, isn't it?
By far and away, it's been pretty consistent that the lower end of the line ... the 2002's and the 3 series cars .... have been substantially better cars in durability and reliability than the upline cars over the last 40 years. But BMW has pursued a path now of such complexity and overdesign on some areas of their cars that the reliability and serviceability is adversely affected. For example, the latest automatic transmissions ... are pretty much beyond the aftermarket to diagnose and repair ... which keeps the control of the cars in BMW's hands.
FWIW, I didn't go out and create all the problems with these cars that were brought to my shop. I had a steady clientele of owners, as well as a sizable number of car lots in my region that brought the cars to me with the respective problems ... cooling systems, heads/gaskets, failed A/C controls/condensors, poor running mechanical and FI problems (although a large factor in these problems was the funny gasoline in our area with high reid vapor pressure and lots of low end fractions dissolved into the more volatile fractions causing rapid fuel break-down). My tech that left to open his own shop didn't go out and break all those transmissions ... they were brought to him by his clientele to get fixed after hearing what it would cost to get repaired at the dealerships.
BMW's in our area had a pathetic record of seriously expensive major electronics and mechanical failures around here, which is one of the reasons why I got involved with the remanfacturing of their electronics many years ago (unfortunately, BMW aggressively sought to end our little bit of the aftermarket and created so many SKU's for so many systems that we couldn't keep up with all the reverse engineering to bring product to market ... so our BMW biz has dropped off in the last decade for the newer cars). But these problems were to the extent that the BMW dealership tech's rapidly surpassed the income of the MB techs in the region. It wasn't uncommon to find many techs at BMW dealers around here making 30-50% more money than MB techs starting in the 1980's, certainly lasting until the mid 2000's. BMW, has, however, set out on a path over the past few years to minimize the tech incomes by putting the diagnostics in the hands of BMW itself. I forsee a lot of issues down the road as the cars which get BMW service as part of the new sale come out of warranty ... you'll see cars that had oil changes at very long intervals making it through the warranty time period, but there will be consequences for that level of maintenance.
In the late 80s I bought a 1972 Cadillac sedan de ville, so over 15 years old, with about 60,000 miles on it. Had been owned by an older couple who had two Caddies (his and hers), didn't drive much and when he passed away, the wife put his car up for sale. I paid $500 for it, drove it for about 5 practically trouble-free years, and sold it for $500. One of my best car buys ever and I still regret selling the thing.
A mechanic once told me that a car's mileage wasn't the issue...the issue is not how many miles it has on the odo but how many it has left. I've bought plenty of used cars and always kept that in mind!
Wow, my first car was a 72 Sedan DeVille.... wish I still had it. That was in 1991.... think we paid $200 for it. Now they command a few more $'s.
Low mileage old cars, while maybe not the norm, are around these days. Three years ago I purchased a 1979 Chevy Malibu Classic Landau with 23,6xx miles on it. Today it has 24,6xx on it. Others on here are right in thinking that while the miles are low, the car may need work done to it, just because it has set more than being driven. My car had a heater core issue, and the infamous late 70s GM camshaft problem (3 slightly rounded lobes), it needed a new fuel pump, and it also has a slight carb issue still. Belive me, there is no doubt as to the miles being actual on this car, it just needed a little tlc from lack of use. I also have a 1964 Chevelle that is showing 94,xxx on it, I believe it to be correct just from the condition of the sheetmetal on the car. While it is not a driver yet, it is definately in very good restoreable shape.
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I have to admit I am a bit..okay..overly cautious about buying a BMW even though I want one. Badly. 
I have read so many articles of people's experiences and generally it appears most people love the cars but about half (from the websites) say they break often. Not so much major components (although have read some nightmare stories) but more with window regulators, water pumps and so forth. I have started threads before about bimmers and everyone was kind of enough to add their input. I guess I am still on the fence and also to obtain one in my price range puts me in an older model with high mileage most of the time. Cars are over priced where I live so looking out of state provides much better buys. So I saw this older one with very low miles and got excited but then I was thinking, Okay what is wrong with it? 
Now they command a few more $'s.
