The red 3.0CSi with the tan leather interior and the Recaros I’ve owned for 40 years began life as a Polaris car with a navy velour interior (for a deeper history, read here). When I had the outer body restoration done in 1988, I color-changed it to Signal Red. Shortly after, I found a white rust-free 3.0CS that had originally been sold into Saudi Arabia that had a tan leather interior and working air conditioning for a price I couldn’t turn down. Choosing which car to hold onto was tough, but I kept the newly-painted red one, swapped interiors, and sold the white one. Air conditioning would need to wait.
Sound, however, would not. Michel Potheau had a wrecked 2002 he was parting out at his Circle Tire shop in nearby Natick, and it had an ADS 100-watt Power Plate amp and a pair of ADS 300i speakers in it. I bought them both and installed them in the E9, cutting holes in the back deck for the speakers. I then took the car to the legendary Beaconwood Motors in Watertown who had the back cover of Roundel for decades and did both BMW repair as well as high-end audio installations. I had them install a Alpine cassette deck on a Benzi Box slide mount in the console. Sadly, I appear to have no photos of it. But at the age of 30, with good tunes in my gorgeous red coupe, I was livin’ the dream. The ADS speakers are gone, but the amp and my cringe-worthy wiring are still there.
When it’s work to take something out, it stays.
And, as with many things, I went too far—I also cut holes in the kick panels under the back seat for subwoofers. Ah, the things we did for audio.
My private shame.
In 1999, I had Bob Poggi at ICE AC (the same guy and company who still sells 2002 a/c systems) work with me to supply components to retrofit a/c into the E9. He sold me a package that included a universal-style evaporator assembly, but I found there was no way to mount a stock console around it. Even 27 years ago, the E9’s value was high enough that not even Hack Mechanic me wanted to deviate from the look of the factory Behr a/c setup, and that approach has only hardened with time—I haven’t seen anyone do the kind of aftermarket installs people routinely now do in 2002s. Instead, I bought an evaporator assembly from a Bavaria (it’s the same unit) and got the system running.
But the console remained a challenging issue, as the side panels and the faceplate are both unique to the E9, and people wanted a lot of money for them even back then. I had a spare non-a/c console from a parts car, so I cut holes in the sides for the squirrel cages of the evaporator’s fan motor, covered them with plastic side pieces from an E12, and ran without any center faceplate at all for a decade. Sadly, I have no photos of this either (okay, maybe not so sadly).
Maybe 15 years ago, I set about to make the console not look like a work in progress, and began the search for the proper air-conditioned pieces at prices I was willing to pay. Terry Sayther had a console from a basket-case parts car, but it was in poor condition and lacked the faceplate. I bought it and had the side panels reupholstered. For the faceplate, I looked on eBay, and found that when they came up for auction, they typically went for $250 for ones on fair condition, and had asking prices as high as $600 for mint ones. I hated to pay anywhere near that kind of money, but it seemed I had little choice. I bid and won one at the low end of the price range, but when I installed it, I found that it didn’t fit properly. It turned out that the faceplate was not from an E9 but from a Bavaria. They look similar, and the Bavaria one sort of fits, but it’s taller, has seven slats instead of six, and most important, the radio cutout is so low that it sits unnaturally behind the shift surround. Had I researched it first on the E9 forum (e9coupe.com), I would’ve known, as there were threads on the differences between the two plates even back then.
The Bavaria faceplate I’d bought had already been cut out for a DIN-sized radio, so I went with the flow and bought a Pioneer CD player. My goal was to have something that looked as dark and unobtrusive as possible, no big green equalizer lights that made it look like it had teleported in from a Star Trek set, and the Pioneer sort of fit that bill, but I never liked either its look or its position.
The Pioneer deck in the E9’s console with the Bavaria faceplate. You can see how ridiculously low it sat. It was difficult to even finger the controls.
In 2019, the E9’s a/c stopped working, and I traced it to a bad expansion valve. This is the a/c repair everyone dreads because the valve is inside the evaporator assembly, and in an E9, getting it out without shattering the rare plastic “intermediate piece” that mates the evap box to the vents is challenging. But out it all came. When I put it back together, I decided to leave out the Pioneer deck, and simply left the gaping radio hole until such time as I found a proper faceplate, at which point I planned to install a proper period-correct radio in it.
Out came the evaporator assembly and the plastic “intermediate piece” on top of it that shatters if you look at it the wrong way.
The wrong-but-empty faceplate since 2019.
When I re-engaged the faceplate search, I found that a fellow named Markos on the E9 forum set out to 3D-print them. You can find the thread here. It’s a great story, one that I want to rub in the face of anyone who blithely says “just 3D-print it” as a solution to any rare or missing part. After multiple iterations, he was successful, and began selling them for about $225. I grabbed one in 2022. I also bought a non-functional but period-correct Blaupunkt Nürnberg radio for a hundred bucks.
Wait, you say… “non-functional?” Yes. After multiple trips to The Vintage and MidAmerica 02Fest in the E9, 2002s, and other vintage BMWs, and using a whole variety of sound systems including the Pioneer with ADS amp and speakers, an iPod feeding what was then a pricey Cambridge Soundworks Model 12 portable system with amp, satellite speakers, and subwoofer, and even a Cambridge Soundworks PCWorks system that was $20 on Craigslist and thus I didn’t care if anyone stole it, my conclusion was that vintage cars have too much wind and engine noise at highway speeds for music to be anything but fatiguing for me, and I gave up listening entirely in favor of blessed relative silence and time to think. So yes, since a non-functional period-correct radio cost a third as much as a functional one, a non-functional period-correct radio was exactly what I wanted.
Only I never installed the faceplate and radio. They got swallowed up by my basement as well as by endless other more pressing automotive projects.
Until a few weeks ago. As I wrote about here, the fact that the spring Nor’East 02er Spring Meet & Drive was coming up and I’d sold Bertha and had my other two 2002s in storage made me take the E9, but before I did, I installed an Alpina shift knob that nice-guy Miguel Frances generously gave me at The Vintage 2025. It looked so good and so right that the Bavaria faceplate with its gaping empty radio hole instantly bugged the bejesus out of me.
So, last week I tore the basement apart until I found the 3D-printed faceplate and the Blaupunkt Nürnberg radio. Unfortunately, when I test fit the latter into the former, I found that the center portion of the radio was slightly too big for the cut-out. Damn! And the idea of enlarging the cut-out in the brand-new faceplate was an anathema to me.
The Blaupunkt Nürnberg with its cute little orange push-button. Sadly, it was not to be.
Then I remembered that I had a box in the basement with a few other vintage radios and cassette decks. Miraculously I found a Blaupunkt Frankfurt, also non-functional, in it that fit the faceplate perfectly.
Oh yeah.
Before I pulled the Bavaria faceplate out, I looked at it in the console, and saw two things. The first was that since my car is a Euro-only 3.0CSi, the climate control functions are labeled in German, but the text on the Bavaria a/c faceplate was in English, something I never noticed before. I was glad that the replacement plate was free of any lettering. But the second was that my console had large gaps where the tops of the side pieces slid in beneath the dash. I vaguely remembered this from when I’d installed the console 15 years ago. I looked at photos of consoles on E9s on Bring a Trailer, and they all showed gaps, though none as large as this. I spent an hour trying to remedy it, determined that it couldn’t be done without taking the console out and relocating the brackets holding the sides together, and gave up.
The German mixed with English was funny. The gaps at the top were something I just had to live with.
With the faceplate out, I could a/b the old and new. Below you can see how the Bavaria plate is bigger, has seven slats, and the correct plate has six (or, if you count openings instead of slats, eight and seven), and how its radio cut-out is at the bottom. Note that in the photo below, the Bavaria plate is also wearing its rubber duck bill at the bottom which makes it look even longer.
Bavaria faceplate on the left, reproduction E9 on the right.
Getting the thing mounted was challenging. I didn’t photograph it, but there are four tabs on the faceplate at right angles to the front with holes drilled in them. There were existing holes in the sides of the console, but they didn’t come close to lining up. And there was no easy way to mark where to drill new holes because with the faceplate pre-positioned, I couldn’t get behind it to put something like a punch through the holes in the tabs. So I measured from the front as best as I could, marked and drilled holes in the console sides, test-fit the plate, found that the holes were substantially off but at least they were close enough to hit the tabs on the sides of the plate, and drilled new holes there.
The last question was whether or not to use a very cool original Blaupunkt chrome bezel that I’d bought years ago. With a little fettling, it fit and looked good against the faceplate and radio, but when I test-fit everything into the console, I found that, to my surprise, it drew my eye downward in a way I didn’t like. I removed it.
Surprisingly, no.
The final item was the knobs, as neither Blaupunkt had them. I did some searching on eBay, but then remembered that, when I bought the faceplate and the Nürnberg, my friend Andrew Wilson had sent me a rare set of BMW-specific Blaupunkt knobs. Incredibly, I found them in the chaos of my garage. As Dr. Evil said to Mini-Me, “You complete me.”
Yeah baby. And yes I have the cigarette lighter with the matching knob.
I used to ridicule people who obsessed over this kind of stuff in their cars. I even wrote a piece once where I said “And, when you finally get that last new trim piece installed—spoiler alert—it’s not going to make you any happier.” The degree to which I smile when I slide into the E9’s seat and look at the new center console landscape shows how wrong I was. It’s enough to make me think about cleaning up the engine compartment and the trunk.
Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.
