The car was a hand-me-down from one of our grandparents, with ~100K miles on the odometer.
They owned it since new, and like most old people’s cars - it was religiously serviced. Keeping up with maintenance goes a long way towards keeping most cars on the road (unless they’re BMWs, but that’s a whole other story).
Keeping up with maintenance goes a long way towards keeping most cars on the road (unless they’re BMWs, but that’s a whole other story).
Ironically, well maintained BMWs have significantly better durability than Hyundais of that era, just not reliability.
I see M57 engined BMWs doing 500k+ km all the time. ZF 6HP transmissions are pretty good too. Yet the BMW E60/E61 and similar era 3 and 7 series that had these engines and transmissions are considered very unreliable, because everything else around that super solid core breaks down every now and then. They last forever, they’ll just leave you stranded crying when some plastic pipe in the god damn cooling system breaks again.
German cars of the past are the epitome of “durability, not reliability”. Now they no longer have that durability, but have increased reliability in the first part of ownership I think.
My old E-class must’ve had like 700k km or more in reality (it’d been nicely adjusted to <400k km, but some modules showed higher mileage… hmmmmmm) and the engine still ran just fine, transmission shifted just fine… But the power steering failed, sunroof leaked and ruined the sunroof control module, and the parking sensors didn’t really work either… Oh and I had the dreaded injector seal issue multiple times.
The car was a hand-me-down from one of our grandparents, with ~100K miles on the odometer.
They owned it since new, and like most old people’s cars - it was religiously serviced. Keeping up with maintenance goes a long way towards keeping most cars on the road (unless they’re BMWs, but that’s a whole other story).
Ironically, well maintained BMWs have significantly better durability than Hyundais of that era, just not reliability.
I see M57 engined BMWs doing 500k+ km all the time. ZF 6HP transmissions are pretty good too. Yet the BMW E60/E61 and similar era 3 and 7 series that had these engines and transmissions are considered very unreliable, because everything else around that super solid core breaks down every now and then. They last forever, they’ll just leave you stranded crying when some plastic pipe in the god damn cooling system breaks again.
2 words that any BMW owner from that era fears: VANOS pump.
Oh yeah, definitely.
German cars of the past are the epitome of “durability, not reliability”. Now they no longer have that durability, but have increased reliability in the first part of ownership I think.
My old E-class must’ve had like 700k km or more in reality (it’d been nicely adjusted to <400k km, but some modules showed higher mileage… hmmmmmm) and the engine still ran just fine, transmission shifted just fine… But the power steering failed, sunroof leaked and ruined the sunroof control module, and the parking sensors didn’t really work either… Oh and I had the dreaded injector seal issue multiple times.