A few weeks ago I wrote about how, this summer, I foolishly passed on a unicorn E91 six-speed rear-wheel drive sport package no-nav wagon largely because it was in Salt Lake City. Now, as my penance, my Facebook Marketplace feed seems to be flooded by ads for cheap automatic AWD wagons within striking distance.
I didn’t really take these ads seriously because I don’t want an automatic AWD wagon, but one of them stood out—a $2500 2008 328xi in Rockland, Maine. The ad said “Selling as-is. This is a southern car with two New England winters so the rust is minimal for her age. Known problems: Engine misfires cylinders 5&6, heavy coolant leak, front suspension needs work, driver’s door doesn’t power unlock, needs new brake pads. I have changed oil at 150k miles. New battery and engine ground cable 8/25. This would be a great project car for someone.” The ad showed what appeared to be a tidy-looking black car with what looked like a Dakota Earth interior. The latter struck a chord with me, as that’s what the triple-unicorn car had.
Nice looking wagon.
Automatic and iDrive, but still.
Rockland is about four hours from me. I bought a car up there once before. By the time I rented the U-Haul trailer, drove up, looked at the car, decided to buy it, loaded it, hauled it home, unloaded it, and returned the trailer, it was nearly a 14-hour day. I try not to be one of those buyers who peppers a seller with endless questions and doesn’t follow through, but I was curious enough that I engaged. He sent me the VIN, and I ran the Carfax and the VIN decoder. Yes, it was all-wheel drive which I swore I would never own again after needing to replace the front axles in my E46 AWD wagon, and yes it was an automatic which would break my string of only ever having owned one BMW automatic (a 1977 530i I bought in 1988 for a song), and no it technically didn’t have the sport package, but it had the sport seats and steering wheel, and paddle shifters. And it wasn’t black—it was Monaco Blue.
The seller said that the coolant leak appeared to be coming from the thermostat, but that the car was still drivable, giving about 20 minutes before the level in the reservoir dropped enough for the low-coolant warning to come on. I asked if the car had been overheated, and he said that only once did it get hot enough to generate a temperature warning (E90s don’t have a temperature gauge). Regarding the misfires, he messaged “Not really sure what’s going on there. I took it to a shop because the codes were reading as a bad O2 sensor. The shop found that cylinders 5 and 6 were misfiring, and one of the cylinders had scratches inside that allowed oil to drip onto the O2 sensor (I replaced the head gasket about 20k miles ago).” I had no idea what to make of any of that other than to interpret it all as added risk. Since I wasn’t really that interested in a AWD automatic anyway, I let it drop. Then I came down with a surprise case of Covid and was out for a week.
When I returned to the land of the mentally alert and physically active, I looked at the ad again, and saw that the seller had dropped the price to $2000. I also did a search on the combination of Monaco Blue and paddle shifters, and found a thread from 2018 on BimmerPost from the previous owner when he was advertising the car. In his photos, the Dakota Earth interior absolutely popped. I thought “I should go and see this car. If I can get it for $1500, the risk is minimal, I’ll find out if I even like E91 wagons, and I’ll have several months of content for these columns.” (The funny thing was that in the previous owner’s ad for the car, he’d written “I bought this because I wanted to step up from my e46 xi wagon and I loved the options, but I’m a lifelong manual transmission guy and I can’t handle the missing clutch pedal.” :^)
Ka-POW.
I re-engaged the seller and tried to make an appointment to see the car, and was told that it had a new problem: It wouldn’t start. I did my “Is it no-start or no crank?” remote triaging. The seller sent me a video of the push-button start being engaged and the engine struggling to crank and the dashboard lights flashing.
This rang a bell. Last year a neighbor with a MINI had a similar problem. It turned out to be due to the ground strap having broken away from the engine. I got it running for him so he could drive it to a repair shop by simply connecting a jumper cable from a good chassis ground to a good engine ground. I shared the info with the owner of the wagon and said that I’d be glad to come look at it as-is. He said that if no one bought the car during the week, he’d try the jumper cable trick over the weekend. If it worked, he’d see if he could procure and install a battery strap.
Thinking that maybe I should act before he put time and money into the car, I looked closely at the seller’s Facebook profile to make sure I was correct about him living in Rockland, and it said he lived on Cranberry Isles, which is off Acadia and considerably further up than Rockland. I thought “Is this why the car hasn’t sold? Is there even a car ferry to Cranberry Isles?” (There’s not.) Suddenly the air went back out of my drop-everything-and-just-go-look-at-it sails.
But as the weekend approached, I mentally re-engaged and looked at the availability of U-Haul auto transporters. I contacted the seller on Friday and asked about his availability. He said that he’d just sold the wagon to a guy with several other E90s. I said “Congrats, bummer for me, but Cranberry Isles was further than I really wanted to drive anyway.” He said that he’d moved down to Rockland a few years ago. So I overthought this part of it.
When we really want a car, we don’t do the Que Sera Sera thing. We jump on it. A set of paddle shifters, an Earth-colored interior, and an appealing price weren’t enough to overcome my inertia and my risk threshold.
But if I read some post by someone crowing about how they just bought a Monaco Blue E91 wagon for a thousand bucks, it just needed a coolant hose and an engine ground strap, and the paddle shifters are the bomb, I’m going to be pissed.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s latest book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books, including Just Needs a Recharge: The Hack Mechanic Guide to Vintage Air Conditioning. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
