At our last service visit, our advisor reminded us to purchase the BMW extended warranty while the original factory warranty was still in effect. He emphasized, DO NOT drive one of these past 50K miles without a warranty. He added “Better yet, if you want a reliable road trip vehicle, trade it before 50K miles.” Ha!
Bottom line…those vehicles are engineered to be solid past 250K miles, but you won’t drive it that far because maintenance & repairs when something goes wrong are way toooo expensive. They are very complex cars, so stuff does go wrong as they age.
The M50i is nice. Powerful. Sounds good. But runs stupid hot with the “hot V” turbo placement. Beware. The earliest versions were quite unreliable. My ‘22 is a Gen 3, that supposedly has extra heat shielding & many of the earlier gremlins resolved. So far, it’s only stranded me once in 36K miles, when the plastic fan unexpectedly threw a blade & punctured the radiator. Kind of a freak event.
I do plan to trade the X5, but maybe not on the RHO. We need a vehicle to reach remote trailheads. The X5 has served that purpose reasonably well, but I always feel bad hammering such a nice, luxury SUV over minimally maintained dirt roads & rocky washes. The RHO will serve that purpose better. My wife is looking at a BMW electric i4 or i5, so the X5 may get traded for another BMW if she commits before the RHO arrives.
