Jiggy said:
Awesome car – drove one once and it’s by far the best, IMO, engine the BMW M Division has made to date. Stock car with stock exhaust and nothing made my hairs stand on end like that....
Absolutely epic.
Having said that, I hear a lot of them had to get engines replaces, mostly bearings. Workshops mentioned that these cars HAVE to be drive hard often to build up enough ‘engine pressure’ as it’s technically a race-type motor – don’t know if this is correct?!?
What about the gearbox? Not sure how resilient these are??
The gearbox is under warranty as the owner had it replaced due to sticky clutch/slipping clutch, but I read these boxes do not give problems, and when they do a software updates sorts it out usually.
As for the engine bearings, while researching it, it seems all M cars from e46 had bearing issues. The E46 was resolved by BMW but M5, M6 and E90> M3 have the same bearings. So this is purely taking properly care of ypur M car.
The plan of action is to change the bearings before failure, this has been my plan even before buying the car. But tomorrow it will be getting a proper service, the old oil will be sent for oil and wear analysis, this alone will say if the lead contents of the oil is of concern. The following services from there on will also be sent for analysis. This might seem overkill, but adding R350 to a service is not that bad to have peace of mind.
The urgency of the bearing change will depend solely on the analysis report.
At the end it's all worth it.
