[Efthreeoh]

Soooo.... At my local BMW dealer with the 2005 E46 cabrio. She's in for the airbag recall (2nd round). Just got the "list"...

I bought this car from a friend for $3,000 in Sept 2019 with 100,000 on the clock, now we're at 125,000 with it. The "list" is $3,480, lol. My car needs tires (well not at the wear bars yet). Needs front brake lines because they are dry rotted (that's a new one), coolant flush, "coolant should be blue" (the POs service records show cooling system work and new coolant at around 75,000 miles - going from memory). Oh, and a PS flush, "fluid is milky red, should be clear red. Again, PO's records show PS hose replacement at 75,000 also so the PS fluid is not too old. And the last issue? Yes, that's right, a leaking oil pan gasket ($1,400)! The brake hose replacement was quoted at $670. Now that is insultingly priced way too high. The price for the pan isn't too bad at a dealership.

The tech even sent me a video of his inspection.

I told my very nice SA in a respectful manner, "Well, I have a '06 E90 with 404,000 on it, you have records on it from 2013 when it had 221,000 miles and I brought it in when the oil life monitor stopped working. If I've kept the E90 running all this time, I can do all that myself, but thanks for letting me know". He gave me a fist bump and said, "Understood, no problem, we just need to let you know what we found." I'm good with getting the list, just makes it more fun...

And dealerships do need to make money.

[FC4]

Cool.

[W///]

The prices are stupid, that's for sure, but I don't think the list is all that outrageous personally. While my cars are drivers, they don't have anywhere near the mileage yours do (first bump from me!). I'm religious about at least keeping the fluids fresh if I can, so 50k miles on power steering fluid is not that unfathomable to me. I know it doesn't take the CHF11 on my E92 M3 to smell pretty burnt, so I have no problem just using turkey baster and just throw some fresh fluid in there.

As I said, you're probably doing something right since you're getting really crazy mileage out of your cars, but when it comes to fluid, I'm OK going a little overboard since I plan to keep these cars for good.

Funnily enough, my first car was a 2000 BMW 328i with a 5MT. I got an offer for a free inspection and they ended up finding stuff like this too. They also found a crack on the rear subframe (this was during when the recalls were just announced), which meant an entire new floor. Car was out for months, and I was in a rental the entire time. God knows how much money they lost because of that "list" because the car was probably only worth $5k at that point.