I've heard Scotty say BMWs were always expensive but they used to be reliable. Which year was the last reliable BMW made without plastic parts under the hood. My dad was planning to buy a used automatic car for my sister to drive to college. I wanted to know which is the newest BMW's I can search for that are reliable because everyone thinks even old BMW's are very unreliable and hence they are cheap. Also any specific things I should look for other than make sure it's not a young person who trashed it and is selling it?
(It has to be an automatic)
I will give you my personal view
Bmw are reliable when new and if you have a warranty.
The reason why bmw break is because long service internal and things wear down because of use of this. 15,000 km is to longmy personal view between oil change and things are made from plastic.
The reason they are money pits is not because they break is because parts are expensive and it many man hours to do a job. How often they break people can debate.
Old bmw pre 2000 where good nice including the m spec. M spec where had to much racing technology.
Hope this helps
BMWs from the 80s and back used to be not only similar to Toyota's level of durability but they were also easy to work on. I had an E21 that went almost 300k miles with not much done but fluids and a clutch cylinder. I have an e30 with 184k on the original clutch, and minimal work done over the years. These things were built like tanks.
I would say that the e36 that started production in the 1990s was the beginning of the downturn and those that came after 2000 seem to be both difficult to service as well as not durable. As with most makes of cars as complexity increases dependability decreases.
