Incredibly, come January, I will have owned my 1999 M Coupe for 20 years. That’s an astonishingly long time for it to be swimming in my automotive waters where the churn tends to be high. Only the 40-year-owned 3.0CSi, the car they’ll bury me in, has been around longer. And the longevity is all the more remarkable because the car sees very little use—since buying it, I’ve put just 14,000 miles on it.
This is all a bit strange. When I bought the car in southeastern Massachusetts in the dead of winter of January, 2007, I test-drove it, nailed the gas while getting onto the highway, found myself doing 90, and even though the car had four bent wheels and bad shocks and struts, I was instantly and totally smitten. I still had my engineering job and it was still producing real income, but had three kids, my oldest approaching college, and I had just built the garage, so the income was far from disposable. So I took out a bank loan to buy the M Coupe, which was unprecedented. Plus, I still owned the ’82 Porsche 911SC I’d bought in 2001, so buying a second little two-seater go-kart wasn’t exactly “responsible.” In my defense, I still adored the Porsche, but they were very different cars, and the M Coupe was so much newer, tighter, and faster. I couldn’t get enough of it, both driving-wise and eyeball-wise (I mean, that fat planted rear end, come on). I gave it what it needed, and absolutely loved everything about it.
Photo taken when I went down to look at the car in January 2007. I’d forgotten that my daily at this time was a 318ti.
The end of the honeymoon came a few years later when I took the car on its one and only long drive. I had to go to Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey for my job. Being an old Long Island boy, I thought I could knock this off in my sleep, not even long enough to call it a road trip. To my surprise, I found that, although the M Coupe’s heavily-bolstered seats certainly do a great job of holding you in place, the foam was too stiff to conform and give me real back and butt support. After several hours of driving, I was in agony. And I still had the drive home to deal with.
Beautiful, and great when you’re throwing the car around entrance ramps, but they’ve never agreed with my back.
Over the years I tried several things to make the seats more tolerable. I tilted them backward an inch (a solution listed on the M Coupe forums), and it made a small difference, but not nearly enough. Of course, you can use back and butt pillows, but the seats are so narrow and the car is so small that that’s not the go-to solution that it is in, say, a Bavaria. I thought about installing a set of vintage Recaros like I’ve done in the older BMWs, but the M Coupe, like many modern cars, has the belt tensioners integrated with the seats, so that’s not a trivial thing to do.
In 2011, the funding at my long-time engineering job began to become unstable, and it was clear that I needed to dial back my automotive extravagance. The 911SC and the M Coupe were the car that were each worth about four mortgage payments. On paper, it made sense to sell the Porsche. I’d owned it 10 years and enjoyed the hell out of it, but it was still worth about the 10 grand I’d paid for it in 2001, and it was beginning to leak oil out the oil return tubes connecting the head and the case. I bought the collapsible-style tubes that you don’t need to pull the heads off to install, but their installation was blocked by the heater boxes, and when I looked at the studs and nuts holding them to the head, I could see that they were corroded to the thickness of the lead in a pencil, and would snap if I even thought about removing them. As much as I loved the 911SC, it felt like an old German car not unlike the 2002s and the 3.0CSi. In contrast, the M Coupe was three generations newer, much quicker, and was like nothing else I owned. Plus, although long-hood small-bumpered 911s had appreciated dramatically, 911SCs and Carreras were still readily-available commodity cars. I figured that when my employment situation stabilized, I could buy back into the Porsche world with a late 80s Carrera with the G50 transmission and hydraulic clutch.
So I kept the M Coupe and sold the SC for the 10 grand I paid for it. It wasn’t a panicked sale. I had it on Craigslist and on eBay. Local Porsche people came and looked at it. With faded Rosewood metallic brown paint, a rust blister the size of a quarter in one of the doors, and a bit of oil leakage, that’s what it was worth.
Of course, within a few months, everything air-cooled went bloody nuts, and it was clear that my timing couldn’t have been worse. At the time, I didn’t really think “Should’ve sold the M Coupe instead.” It was more like “I wish circumstances hadn’t squeezed me into making this choice.” To this day, selling that car when I did stands out as the worst automotive decision I ever made, and the specter of the Porsche appreciating so dramatically so soon after I sold it has hung over the M Coupe in terms of my being afraid that the same thing will happen to it. So I’ve kept it.
But road trips are the crucible in which relationships with cars are formed, and the fact that only short drives were comfortable in the M Coupe was a problem. Other than a few short excursions and evenings out with Maire Anne, and shuttling it back and forth between the house and warehouse storage (first in Fitchburg, then in Monson), the car largely sat. I’ve kept it legal and exercised, but even when it’s at the house, I find that I don’t use for pleasure drives through the leafy towns to the west. It’s the vintage BMWs and the Lotuses that excel at driving 42 in a 35 zone and feeling like you should be arrested. The M Coupe is the opposite. It wants you to nail it and throw it around. Decades ago I wrote in Roundel that “The M Coupe is a dirty mistress who unzips your trousers in front of company and doesn’t care.” That’s still true, but maybe I just want to go for a nice walk in the woods with my wife. By far, the most use it saw in the last 15 years was the video I shot with Magnus Walker five years ago.
Yes, that’s a police car behind us. I wrote up the-story-behind-the-story here (https://bimmerlife.com/2021/05/08/my-dream-date-with-magnus-walker/).
As you probably know, the M Coupe was a skunk-worked project based on the Z3 roadster spearheaded by Dr. Burkhard Göschel, BMW’s director of special vehicles, and his team. Only 2180 S52 cars were built for the North American market in model-years 1999 and 2000, and just 678 S54 cars in 2001 and 2002. They weren’t universally loved at the time (many reviews called the design “polarizing”), but collectability is usually a combination of a unique shape, a unique vibe, performance, and rarity, and the M Coupe certainly fits the bill. To be clear, my car certainly has appreciated to be worth on paper about twice what I paid for it 20 years ago, but it’s the low-mileage S54 cars in zingy colors that bring nosebleed prices on Bring a Trailer. A driver-quality Titanium Silver S52 M Coupe with a solid black interior like mine is the lowest on the desirability and rarity scale on the M Coupe Buyer’s Guide. So even though I rarely drive it, I’ve held off selling it because of the fear that, as is the case with air-cooled 911s, at some point, the car’s rarity and desirability will cause all of them to be worth big money, regardless of engine, color combination, mileage, and condition.
Adding this because, well, it never gets old.
Three years ago, I wrote the detailed description, shot the videos needed to sell it, and walked right up to the water’s edge with a friend in the BMW world who was interested in buying it, but I pulled back. I just wasn’t ready to do it, though I promised him dibs on the car if I changed my mind. But having sold the Bavaria, the 1979 Euro 635CSi, and Bertha the past year because I wasn’t really driving them either, and seeing how much joy their new owners are having with the cars, I decided that maybe the time to push the clown shoe back out into the world had come.
The spaces I rent in the Monson warehouse cost me just $70 a month for each car, but for five cars, if you do the math, that’s $350 a month, $4200 a year. The incredible thing was that, after selling the Bavaria, the 635CSi, and Bertha, I still had five cars in Monson. How, I thought, was this even possible? The answer was that I never really had the space for 14 cars. When I bought the FrankenThirty two years ago, it sat outside that first winter, as did Zelda the Z3, and I’ve been using my 100-year-old neighbor Jeanette’s garage to hold a car. The Monson spaces are paid for in three-month increments, so a few months ago I made a deal with myself that, come July, I’d bring two cars home and cut the spaces there down from five to three. Maire Anne drove me and my friend Bob Selfridge out to Monson, and we brought back the FrankenThirty and the M Coupe. My logic was that I’d look at selling the M Coupe, and I like having the FrankenThirty around—it’s really the perfect knock-around vintage BMW.
The M Coupe and the FrankenThirty leaving the warehouse.
Normally, when I sell a car, I write up a punch list of its needs that goes into the description, then try to fix as many of them as I can because it’s better to do that than to have to disclose and apologize for them. In the M Coupe, these were a long-standing issue with the window in the driver’s side door not properly stopping at the top, and the SRS (airbag) light being on, which I’ve fixed in the past by disconnecting and reconnecting the seat belt tensioner plug. Unfortunately, although my back is better than it was a few months ago, I still need to be very careful with it, and fixing these things was more than I could manage; even the usual pre-sale chores of washing, cleaning, and photography were challenging.
How can you not love that rear end?
Of course there are some things that you can’t fix, either because they’re baked into the car’s history, or because you lack certain skills. In the former column is the fact that despite the car having a clean CarFax, it’s clearly been repainted. I remember that, when I bought it, the seller said the left side got scraped by a snowblower, and that side was repainted, but on closer examination, it extends to the whole car. In the latter category, the hole in the rocker panel for the front left jack pad has a strange elongation in it, as if someone put a floor jack there and it slipped. If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t see it, but I know it’s there, and I can’t not disclose it.
So I contacted the fellow who had dibs on the M Coupe to see if he was still interested in the car. He said he was. I said that I wanted to get mid-20s for it. He didn’t think that was a problem.
“Let me resend you the description and videos from a few years ago,” I said.
“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “I know what the car is.”
“Yes I do,” I insisted. I put it all together and sent it off to him.
About two minutes later, the phone rang.
“Yeah… about that…”
While I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to negotiate price after they’ve seen a a full-disclosure list of needs and quirks, this was so early in the sale process that I didn’t have much incentive to lower the price. Plus, he said that, for him to buy the car, he’d need to sell two of his, so even if he wanted it, it wasn’t exactly a wire-the-money-right-now proposition.
So I did what I’d done with great success for the Bavaria, 635CSi, and Bertha—I floated it on my Facebook page, priced at what I thought it was worth, with an honest description. The response was good—two of my buyers chimed in on what a trustworthy fellow I am to buy a car from—but no one seriously engaged me.
The next step was to cast a slightly wider net and cross-post it to the Facebook pages for The Vintage and M and Z3 Coupe Enthusiasts. This generated a little more traction, but still no serious contacts.
Of course if I really wanted the car gone, the go-to move would be to list it on an auction site, as the auction process produces a sale price and a buyer, and as long as the price meets reserve and the buyer doesn’t flake out, the result is that the car sells. But that’s a lot of work, and I feared that with my car’s common color combination, driver-quality condition, and the caveats about the driver’s side window and the airbag light, it might stall at auction. One of my main metrics in selling a car is that if it reaches a point where if I saw it advertised for the price I’d need to sell it for, I’d buy it, and I felt that could happen to the M Coupe, particularly at auction.
So I did what I hated to do and listed it on Facebook Marketplace with its insulting sight-seen offers and its ubiquitous “Is it available?” messages. Maire Anne tells me that when I sell a car, I disclose so much that I actively try and scare buyers off, so I ratcheted the detail level back from 11 to 8.5, swallowed hard, held my nose, and submitted the ad, with the first line in the description saying “ALL SIGHT-UNSEEN OFFERS AND IS-IT-AVAILABLES WILL BE IGNORED” and the second one “READ THE WHOLE AD, WATCH THE WHOLE VIDEO, THEN ASK ME A REAL QUESTION.”
The first response simply said “$21k.” (Those of you who send these ridiculous no-words-just-the-offer messages: Does it EVER work?)
The second was the ubiquitous “Hi, is this available?”
The third was the ridiculous “Why is it priced so high $10k maybe for a 27 year old bmw with 109k miles.”
Grrrrrr.
But eventually, three interested parties, two within striking distance, contacted me. One of them, a fellow from Albany who also owns a 2002, asked me reasonable questions, seemed like my kind of buyer, and began talking about driving out to take a look at the car. I wrote up a document disclosing absolutely everything I was aware of on the car, the kind of thing I’d want to have if I was about to drive six hours round trip (it makes me crazy when I drive real distance to look at a car, see something that really should’ve been disclosed, roll my eyes, and think “well that was a complete waste of time”). He read it and said that nothing in it changed his interest. A day later, he made the trip, showed up on time, we had a respectful negotiation over the last few hundred bucks, and he gave me a sizeable deposit. The selling price is slightly less than what I wanted to get, but is exactly the right price for what the car is worth with its quirks (including the repainting and the jack pad hole) fully disclosed. And I know the car will be going to a good home.
So the M Coupe is spoken for, but while the buyer is working the usual get-the-car-home logistics of coming back with either a second driver or a trailer, its beautiful fat planted butt can still grace my driveway for another week or so. And give me time to possibly regret what I’ve done.
As long as it’s not here so long that the car actually shoots up in value :^)
—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.
