In July, I gave the M Coupe a proper send-off with a grand Colorado road trip. This month, I’ll bid farewell to another car I’ve had in the quiver with another epic road trip. The 1992 BMW E34 525iX first showed up in the spring of 2021. A good friend was selling the Swiss-market imported touring, and the wagon fanatic in me couldn’t resist. What wagon fanatic could resist an ultra-rare Granite silver metallic all-wheel drive 5-speed manual long-roof?
A Euro E34 525iX touring is as rare as they come.
As it sat, it was a great driver-quality example I should have left alone. I got sideways when I tried to make it better. The M50-powered E34 wasn’t fast by any stretch of the word, but it went down the road wonderfully. My friend had already improved it with Alpina replica wheels and some basic maintenance. It had a little shimmy under braking and an annoying wheel-bearing vibration that the obsessive-compulsive in me just couldn’t let ride. The problem with this was that in the 1990s, an all-wheel drive touring was the European equivalent to a Ford F150 in the States. They were used to the full extent of their utility, and while the body was relatively rust-free, the subframe and suspension components were quite rusty. This required the complete replacement of the rear trailing arms, brake calipers, and many associated nuts and bolts. Not a bid deal, right? I knew of a few E34 parts cars around; I could easily swap over all of the rusty bits and be on my merry way.
Negative…
In typical fashion, the all-wheel drive version of the E34 touring has its own unique undercarriage bits, which have been no longer available (NLA) for years. This required no less than three years of searching to acquire from various scrapyards overseas. While I was in there, I decided to do the clutch as well. But, the reward was worth the wait because when it was all done, the E34 was one of the smoothest BMWs I’ve ever driven. With three years of anticipation built up, it owed me a proper road trip.
The E34 wagon did what BMW 5 Series wagons do–carved up the miles like butter.
And, it just so happened I had a road trip up my sleeve. For the next episode of Life’s Too Short for Boring Cars, we needed an interesting BMW to haul a week’s worth of gear to some obscure places over some potentially unimproved roads. We would basically be living out of the car for a week, covering thousands of miles. The all-wheel drive touring was the perfect fit. Mechanically, it was ready for action, but there were a few loose ends that I couldn’t get parts for in time.
With no air conditioning, we rigged up the cool suit system from the race car.
Namely, two air conditioning hoses that were still in transit from Germany. This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if all of the windows operated—but the E34 was doing E34 things, and the rear windows were stuck up due to a wiring issue. That meant we would have to spend several thousand miles in the early autumn heat in an E34 with no rear windows and no air conditioning. Fortunately, the E36 M3 Lightweight race car was still kicking around. We pulled the cool suit system out of it and ran it through a splitter hose from our friends at Wine Country Racing so we could both wear cool suits. It worked like a charm, providing hours of cooling and another source of ice for our cooler when we were done driving for the day!
The E34 wagon would be our home for the next seven days.
Every treasure hunt requires a map.
The road trip would take us from Denver, Colorado, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in search of the origins of the Fenn Treasure. The treasure was a literal treasure box filled with gold and other valuables hidden by art dealer Forest Fenn in 2010 to encourage people to explore the outdoors. It was found in 2020 after hundreds of thousands of people searched for over a decade hunting it. Retracing some of the locations where it could have been hidden was a great mission to put the E34 touring to the test and see some amazing locations along the way.
Despite its Euro ride height, the all-wheel drive wagon took us to places far off the beaten path.
Crossing the Rio Grande River in Taos, NM.
The last of the aspen trees turning in Western Colorado.
A 30-mile shortcut on dirt roads.
The Grand Teton outside of Jackson, WY.
Yellowstone National Park.
Our journey took us from Santa Fe, upstream along the Rio Grande to the Western Slope of Colorado, the Green River in Utah, and eventually Jackson, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park. The episode will tell the full story and post later this year. In the meantime—spoiler alert—the E34 ran without a hitch and cemented its place as one of the best BMWs I’ve ever driven. Our only issues were a stubborn rear door actuator that refused to latch when it was cold and a slowly dying driver’s window regulator (thankfully, the cool suit system remained operational).
The auto-dimming mirror automatically moves up when in auto mode.
Cowboy hats in Cody, WY, while the E34 brought nothing but smiles.
Spending seven days and a couple of thousand miles in the all-wheel-drive wagon, we discovered a few hidden treasures of our own. The first was that the 525iX was the only E34 with a rack and pinion steering setup. This was due to parts borrowed from the E30 325iX, but it also offered noticeably crisper steering. The other oddity was an auto-dimming rearview mirror that worked by physically angling the mirror upwards instead of the internal lens dimming feature found on later BMWs. The motor still worked, although the sensor was intermittent. The E34 swallowed those miles from highway to dirt roads with poise and grace while always delivering smiles to our faces and hauling an overlander’s worth of gear in the back!
Mission accomplished!
Who knows how long it will take to fix the final issues on the touring, but I’m so deep that it just wouldn’t make sense to stop until it’s right!—Alex McCulloch