Ten years ago, on Presidents Day Weekend in 2016, it was bloody freezing out. To give myself something to do and something to write about, I pounded on Craigslist as an exercise in finding the most appealing standard-transmission BMW available in my area for less than two grand. I found an ad for a 2003 530i 5-speed with 180,000 miles on it for short money. The photos showed a nice-looking Polaris (silver) car with a highly questionable set of aftermarket wheels and a black interior, but said that it had been parked for two years due to an electrical problem. As I looked more carefully at the interior pics, I realized that it was not just a manual-transmission 530i, but a sport package car with the sport seats, three-spoke steering wheel, and “M” badging.
I contacted the seller and asked him about the “electrical problem.”
“Well,” he said, “It won’t start, and when I try to jump it, it just makes that clicking sound.”
I explained that, due to high resistance in jumper cables and corrosion on terminals, sometimes, particularly in cold weather, you need to pull the old battery out, clean the terminals on the ends of the cables, and drop a new or a freshly-charged battery in to get a car to start.
He replied “Yeah, well, I’m an electrician, I understand resistance, and I know it’s not that.”
I had to bite my tongue and not say “Yeah, well, I wrote an automotive electrical book and I’d bet that it is.”
Again, mostly just to give myself something to do on a cold winter’s day and something to write about, I took the battery out of one of the winter-stored cars, fully charged it, then drove in 15-degree weather down to Walpole, MA to see if I was right about the “just needs a battery” thing.
When I got there, I found the car partially obscured in a snowblower-generated mound on one side of the driveway. The seller helped me fully expose the trunk. We pulled the massive battery out, I cleaned the terminals, dropped my freshly-charged battery in, climbed into the interior, and twisted the key.
Vroom.
He was stunned. I was gracious.
The wheels really were a crime against nature.
I could’ve left it all right there. I wasn’t really looking for a car, just a column’s worth of Roundel material, and it generated that. Plus, even if I was interested in the car, I have no issue whatsoever with performing what’s essentially a free driveway diagnosis and repair that increased its value. That is, if a car is being sold cheaply because it’s dead, there’s a lot of risk in it for the buyer (you have no idea what else might be wrong with it), so if you can start and drive the car, you remove a lot of that risk. However, in doing so, you introduce a new risk—that the seller might say “Well, it was worth $X, but now that it’s running, it’s worth $Y.” I’ll take that tradeoff any day of the week: I’ve never had a seller do that; they usually just want the car gone. And these transactions are usually best when buyer and seller are honest and neither one is holding an advantage that the other doesn’t know about.
But other than those wheels that looked like they were bought from a clearance sale at Pep Boys, the car seemed pretty nice. Why not take the next step?
“Can I drive it?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “But it’s not registered, and the inspection sticker’s expired.”
We shoveled the car out of the snow mound. That unearthed a nearly-flat tire. Fortunately, he had a compressor in his garage. We filled it up, I swapped on the plates from my car (I don’t even remember what I drove down in), and we took it for a short drive. Other than flat-spotted tires, the brakes chattering from the deposits that had accumulated on the rotors, and an illuminated check engine light, there was nothing obviously wrong with it.
Yummy, right?
Suddenly, an academic exercise morphed into actual interest. This was surprising for several reasons. First, as I said, I really wasn’t looking to buy a car. This was early 2016 when I was in that period of limbo at Bentley Publishers when I was told that my employment there wouldn’t last much longer. I was trying to eke through the winter by driving my piece-of-shit Suburban with the repaired brake lines and, if necessary, my Z3. Second, I’d owned that 528iT wagon that was the worst neediest daily driver I’d ever owned. However, I remembered Charlie Burke at Bentley saying that BMW had made a lot of small updates to and worked a lot of the bugs out of the E39 during its production run, and this one was a 2003 model. And, above all that, something in the 530i spoke to me.
“I tell you what,” I said. “Now that it’s running, you and I both know that you can run down to Autozone, spend $150, buy a battery, and sell it as a running car. If you want to do that, go ahead. All’s fair in love and Craigslist. But it’s not registered, insured, or inspected, and the check engine light is on. I’ll give you $1200 for it.”
The seller immediately countered “How about $1500?”
“That,” I said, “is exactly the right price for this car.”
Maire Anne drove me down the next day to pick it up. With its supportive sport seats and the best most integrated-sounding stereo of any car I’ve ever owned, it was an absolute joy to drive back home.
There were three immediately-needed repairs. I inadvertently encountered the real reason why the car had been parked for two years: A failed Final Stage Unit (FSU) was causing the battery to drain overnight. I’d also had this happen on the 528iT wagon. It’s located up under the dash and isn’t terribly difficult to replace. The check engine light turned out to be due to an evaporative leak in a small rotted section of hose that I easily found with one of those $80 smoke testers. I repaired that, replaced the rotors and pads, got the car insured, registered, and inspected, and began using it as my daily driver.
That was 10 years ago. Which is incredible. I don’t think I’ve owned another daily driver for half that long, maybe less.
My wagon fixation notwithstanding, I normally prefer smaller snappier-handling cars, but I rapidly grew to love the 530i stick sport. The 230hp M54B35 gives the car exactly the right amount of power. It’s not so much that you keep mashing the throttle to get the rush like on my M Coupe, but plenty to get the car moving, pass when you need to, and keep it fun. And because it’s a straight-six, it doesn’t have the timing chain guide wear issues of the 300hp V8 in the 540i. I joke that it’s my old man car because I say things like “It’s comfortable. It’s got great seats, a great stereo, and great air conditioning,” but there’s no shame in owning a car that you’re, well, comfortable pounding out hours of driving in.
Because of the experience I had with the 528iT wagon where I did all manner of prophylactic maintenance only to have other things break, I took a different tack with the 530i: I didn’t go out of my way to fix things that weren’t broken. I wasn’t an idiot about it—I replaced the CVV with the insulated version, and when I found obvious play in one lower control arm, I replaced both, but I didn’t take it as a license to redo the entire front end as I did on the wagon.
I have had a few minor issues with the car, but nothing like the problem-of-the-week-and-five-months-in-the-garage issues with the wagon. On one very hot summer day with the gas tank very low, the car lost power and died, likely due to an overheated fuel pump (being submersed in fuel keeps the fuel pump cool). I replaced it. As with the wagon, the alternator stopped charging on me. I replaced the voltage regulator. That bought me a few years. Then it quit again and I replaced the alternator itself. I never had any cooling issues with it, but when I noticed that the date stamps on all the components were original to the car, I felt like I was whistling past the graveyard. I did the “medium” version of the cooling system update, replacing the radiator and its hoses, water pump, thermostat, expansion tank, serpentine belt, and any noisy idler pulleys, but leaving the difficult-to-access plastic pipes under the manifold, the heater-related hoses, and the tensioner alone. (Ironically, the replacement Graf fuel pump began weeping. I replaced it under warranty.) For a while, in cold weather, the car would throw misfire codes. I’d plug in the scan tool, figure out which cylinder it was, and replace the stick coil. After it happened several times, I replaced all of them at once, and haven’t had the problem since.
The one time it needed a tow, and that was because I assumed I couldn’t make it the hour home after dark with a dead alternator. I was almost certainly right.
The 530i is still soldiering on, but it’s now got 220k on it, and the first rust bubbles are beginning to form on the fender bottoms and rocker panels. One of the reasons I haven’t bought an E91 wagon is that I haven’t felt like I’m ready to kick the 530i to the curb, but I’m nearing the realization that that day may not be far.
I’ve long said that what makes me sell a daily driver is the combination of it rusting, it needing too much work, and my hearing the siren’s song of newer technology sing in the price range that I can afford, but the past 10 years, the opposite dynamic has been at work. That is, the E39 and E46 represent the last generation of BMWs that are relatively straightforward to work on. The models after that have electric water pumps and electrically-assisted steering, and most are all-wheel drive. That’s complexity that I don’t want. When things reach the point where I need to pay someone else to maintain and fix my daily driver, I will probably cease to daily-drive a BMW (*earth shakes*). We’ll see if, when the 530i shuffles off its six mortal stick coils, I try to find another E39, or if it truly represents the end of an era for me.
I usually utter Neil Young’s “Long may you run” only when I sell a car, but in the meantime, in this case, to paraphrase Spock Prime, I’ll let my usual farewell be oddly self-serving and say “Seriously, long may you run, buddy.”
Good boy.
—Rob Siegel
