Farewell

[Laurence]

I have recently sold my X5 after 5 years of ownership and although I haven't been a regular contributer to the forum I have been a regular viewer!
During my ownership the car covered 90,000 miles (120,000 in total). Not all of those miles were trouble free(!) but the information here (and on the old site) is second to none and has saved me many hundreds of pounds over the years - from changing the final stage resistor to replacing all of the front suspension bushes. Its a shame so much information was lost from the old forum, but I'm sure the knowledge out there will be able to help most people.
The X5 will be a hard act to follow - but with an expanding familiy, I now need more seats. I'm still not sure what I'll get as a replacement but I may move to the dark side (Discovery 3)! I've had a bit of a love hate relationship with the X5 to a point where I'm not sure I'd buy another BMW. I had some very expensive problems throughout my time with the car, some of which I wouldn't have expected from a high end brand.

Before I sold the car, I took some of my "mods" off and these are now on ebay - details in the for sale section.

I'll be stopping by just to see what going on and will help with questions where I can!

All the best to you all and keep up the good work.

Laurence.

[AW8]

Laurence............ A forum name from the past I remember you from x5world & the old site.

You did more mods than many...........good ones too.

Would be interesting to know what you got for your car albeit I appreciate this may be personal to you & I repect that.

Glad you like the site.

GLWTS

[Turks]

Hi Laurence..

I agree, it will be a hard act to follow if I ever sold mine.

What were your expensive problems?

Problem is with the high end brand and model such as X5 that there is just so much to go wrong... not a simple Peugeot or Renault.


Turks.

[Sanj]

Farewell Laurence,

Keep us posted on what you buy next and how it fairs with your old X. Wish you all the best sir!

[pvr]

Good to hear you enjoyed the site, perhaps the car slightly less although 90k miles is a pretty good use of a car

[Laurence]

Happy to share what I got for it!

I sold it last week for £8250 - advertised it for £8400.
I could have advertised it for more but having looked at EBay and Autotrader I decided that if I was going to sell it quickly, that was the right price to pitch it at.
I had the car valued over a year ago (possibly 18 months) and the trade in price then was £8500. With the demand for good second hand cars being so high in the past 12 months and the recent bad weather, 4x4 prices are in my opinion, artificially high (as I mentioned, I have been looking at Discovery 3 and I feel these are also massively over valued at the moment) so I decided to cash my chips in and wait 'till the summer when the snow will be forgotten and prices will (hopefully) come down to reasonable levels!
As it turns out, I sold the car to a dealer who is now advertising it on Ebay for £9500 - I hope he can shift it in the next month or so, otherwise he may catch a cold with it!

The expensive problems were mainly due to the BMW garages not correctly diagnosing problems. On two occasions the car broke down. First time the car wouldn't start and it was in the garage for over a week, replaced two injectors and the lifting fuel pump only to eventually find the high pressure fule rail was faulty. Second time, same type of problem in that it wouldn't start. This time it was diagnosed as the high pressure fuel pump, so having spent £750 I took it home and it broke down again. Then it was a glow plug problem and while fixing them they broke one in the head and the car was in there for two weeks!
These faults were mis diagnosed by two seperate BMW dealers!

Those were the expensive ones.
I had the usual work to do; front bushes, rear bushes, FSR etc etc.

I did enjoy owning the car very much, but I did feel it was getting to the point where it could start to be VERY expensive - Turbo or gearbox - and it was nearly due its second inspection 2, so it was a good time for us to part company!

I'll let you know how the new car search goes

[X5Sport]

I must agree with comments about Dealers misdiagnosing problems. It really does seem to me that there is an over-reliance on 'what the computer says' and not enough 'old school' basic diagnosis. But that may be the fault of under-trained technicians, overly clever control systems, meaningless fault codes that get lost in translation, less than reliable parts or bad designs, or of course any mixture of them. I refused to pay a £550 bill on mine which they blamed on the security system (wrong), boot lock (err, wrong again), built in phone system (yup, wrong too) and finally took the car elsewhere at which point they correctly diagnosed a faulty starter motor. I fought the original dealer for two years but just plain refused to pay.

Being in the computer industry we have a phrase CICO, for Cr@p In, Cr@p Out. Programs are only as good as the cheapest programmer can write them.

Good luck with a Disco 3, I think you may be unpleasantly disappointed. Reliability is as big an issue and the dealers are worse!! I had a fleet of more than 20 Discos and I'd still rather have an X5 any day, troublesome or not. You may get lucky.