This month marks my 40th anniversary as a BMW car-owner. For those 40 years, the BMWs that I have been fortunate enough to own have been excellent, and by excellent I mean fun and reliable—and excellent.
On March 1, 1976, I picked up my brand-new Chamonix White (with blue interior) 2002 at the BMW Motor Gross dealership in Bad Windsheim, Germany. Technically, I guess that made it European delivery, but there was no BMW Welt in Munich in those days. In fact, the four-cylinder BMW headquarters building then was only a couple of years old.
After enjoying my new 2002 on some great North Bavarian roads for a few days, I drove it to Bremerhaven and put it on a boat headed for the U.S. Two days later I was on a U.S.-bound plane myself, after completing a 39-month overseas tour. Living in Germany and coming home with a BMW 2002 was a great way to start an Army career!
I kept that 2002 for eighteen and a half years, during which time it never let me down; it never stranded me and always got me home. Yes, it stopped running one night in Pittsburgh, but I got it running again by bending the rotor back into position. For you young folks who have known only BMWs with electronic ignition, a rotor is a thing in a distributor that contacts the distributor cap to send electricity from the coil to the spark plugs. Don’t worry—that won’t be on the exam.
The 2002’s clutch cylinder once went bad, but I was able to get where I needed to go by starting the car in second gear and clutchlessly shifting by matching revs. See what I mean? Very reliable. I probably wouldn’t try that with today’s manual gearboxes, but the 2002 just gave me the feeling that it was strong enough to handle my abusive—I mean skillful—manipulation of the gears without the clutch.
The point is, I experienced no catastrophic failures with my first BMW, and the car let me apply workarounds to the few major glitches that popped up. As a result, that 2002 left me with a positive impression of the brand that still influences my thinking to this day.
We experienced a major failure once in another BMW. In 1988, during my second tour in Germany, Betty and I were returning from a trip to Berlin, clipping along on the Autobahn in her 1986 325es at about 90 mph. If you’re asking why we were doing only 90 on the Autobahn, you weren’t paying attention: We were in a 1986 325es.
Anyway, all of a sudden the car wouldn’t go, even though the engine was running. It turned out that the automatic transmission had converted its innards into metal spaghetti. Even though it was 7:00 p.m.—See? I converted 19:00 for you civilians!—on a Saturday night on a German holiday, we were gathered up by a flatbed and hauled to the nearest BMW dealer, where we dropped the car and picked up a rental—and we were back on the road in under an hour. The dealer replaced the transmission, and I retrieved the car a week later. The happy ending was that BMW picked up the entire cost of the new tranny, even though it was out of warranty, because, in BMW’s words, “It should not have broken.” So, catastrophic failure, yes—but also a satisfactory outcome.
The 325es ran fine for many years thereafter. Well, as fine as a 325es could run, if you know what I mean.
The 1983 Euro-spec 635CSi that I bought used and brought back from Germany tried to leave me stranded outside of St. Louis on a Sunday afternoon over a Memorial Day weekend. I still don’t know why that independent repair shop was open that day, but luckily for me, it was. The bad news was that the car needed a replacement brush/voltage-regulator assembly that attached to the alternator. Who has that part lying around?
It turned out that two weeks earlier, a VW owner had been at the shop and ordered that exact Bosch part, but never picked it up. So there it was, sitting on the counter. Once again, I was on my way in about an hour.
Our next four Bimmers reinforced my belief in BMW’s rock-steady reliability. The ’95 525i was perfect. The ’97 528i is eighteen years old and hasn’t seen the inside of a repair shop since it went out of warranty fourteen years ago. The ’95 M3—now my race car—never had a hiccup when it was a road car, and our 2002 X5 carried us without any drama for over 100,000 miles.
In total, Betty and I have driven more than three-quarters of a million miles in BMWs, and while some of you may have more seat time, that’s still enough miles for me to form a pretty strong opinion on their reliability.
Now, then: about my current daily driver….
I switched to diesel power with a 2011 X535d, which from here on I will just call the X5 diesel. For more than 71,700 miles, it was literally perfect—until it wasn’t. It was a great cruiser, a good hauler, and my favorite tow vehicle. There’s nothing like a diesel when it comes to torque.
A few weeks ago, I was running errands when the X5 diesel suddenly dropped into limp-home mode. It’s an apt description; healthy, the X5 would effortlessly accelerate up a mountain. In limp-home mode, it struggled to get up my driveway. For the first time ever, I pushed the BMW Assist button for a flatbed to take the X5 to the dealer, since fixing this problem was well beyond my skill level.
Apparently a shaft in the turbocharger had snapped. According to the techs, this doesn’t happen very often, which was small consolation given the steep repair bill I was facing. In 40 years and more than 750,000 BMW miles, this was the first time I was stuck and would have to pay for the repairs.
Did this put me off BMWs and cause me to curse their reliability? Of course not. I am so far ahead of the game when it comes to reliable BMW travel that it would take a lot more than this to shake my faith. Things happen; parts break. Sometimes bad things happen to good cars. You fix them or replace them, and you keep driving BMWs because they’re fun and they feel right.
Right now, the X5 diesel is at the dealer, and I have some decisions to make. An upcoming column will probably reveal how this episode turns out—but whatever the solution, I can pretty much guarantee that it will cost a few bucks and be fun to drive.—Scott Blazey
