Here's my take on it all. Having owned an E46 M3 beforehand I already knew of the few issues these cars suffer from. I gather the main issues are the bootlfoor/subframe issue, the HG failures and then vanos, smg pump and diff (although much less common?).
I bought my car at 63500k without a BMW warranty but with a 6 month dealer supplied one from a company called the autogroup, it's a pretty comprehensive one and covers single claims up to £2500. Three weeks before it ran out I decided to get the potential HG issue and pinking checked out at ML. Sure enough a leakdown showed 95psi on most cylinders!! a quick call to the warranty company and almost without quibble it was ok'd. So that's one of the issues sorted almost FOC. The other is the bootfloor, when I viewed my car in February I found a crack then and informed the dealer. I got £1500 off of the price for that as I already knew of the Redish Motorsport kit for this job. As a personal preference even though my car has all the requirements for the BMW goodwill work I personally don't like the idea of that much work being done and read of too many horror stories of BMW dealer cock up's and the like. Having owned and restored a few decent cars over the years I decided the strengthening kit was preferable. So out of my own pocket (although in theory paid for by the purchase price reduction) that's another of the issues sorted.
The warranty runs out soon and I won't renew it even though I can. Nowhere in the warranty covers the vanos or SMG pump anyway as they're a BMW specific part so I will put money aside although that isn't going to break the bank if I ever had to pay ML to sort it, same with a diff issue. In my case I think I would be throwing money away now taking out a BMW warranty considering the major issues have been sorted. I'm just going to keep a few quid aside in case. It might never need to be dipped into ......:-D
I bought my car at 63500k without a BMW warranty but with a 6 month dealer supplied one from a company called the autogroup, it's a pretty comprehensive one and covers single claims up to £2500. Three weeks before it ran out I decided to get the potential HG issue and pinking checked out at ML. Sure enough a leakdown showed 95psi on most cylinders!! a quick call to the warranty company and almost without quibble it was ok'd. So that's one of the issues sorted almost FOC. The other is the bootfloor, when I viewed my car in February I found a crack then and informed the dealer. I got £1500 off of the price for that as I already knew of the Redish Motorsport kit for this job. As a personal preference even though my car has all the requirements for the BMW goodwill work I personally don't like the idea of that much work being done and read of too many horror stories of BMW dealer cock up's and the like. Having owned and restored a few decent cars over the years I decided the strengthening kit was preferable. So out of my own pocket (although in theory paid for by the purchase price reduction) that's another of the issues sorted.
The warranty runs out soon and I won't renew it even though I can. Nowhere in the warranty covers the vanos or SMG pump anyway as they're a BMW specific part so I will put money aside although that isn't going to break the bank if I ever had to pay ML to sort it, same with a diff issue. In my case I think I would be throwing money away now taking out a BMW warranty considering the major issues have been sorted. I'm just going to keep a few quid aside in case. It might never need to be dipped into ......:-D
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