2004 BMW E60 525i

Background:

There isn't as much to say about the 525i. It was a reliable daily driver for 5 years. As with most loyal daily's they aren't as pampered as the project cars and consequently receive less coverage. I have very fond memories of the car though and honestly wish I'd held onto it.

The biggest maintenance item that I encountered was trouble with the automatic transmission due to the "lifetime" gear oil. For a time, BMW was selling cars with lifetime gear oil installed in the transmission. As the name implied, the oil was supposed to last the life of the car. The oil pan didn't even have a drain plug! Unfortunately, real world results didn't agree with this statement. What happened is as the cars got over 100k miles the gear oil would get so dirty that it would start to clog the solenoid array that actually opened and closed hydraulic passages to make the transmission work. When the solenoid got clogged / restricted, you could get erratic shifts and/or getting stuck in limp mode. The solution was to drop the whole transmission pan, drain the oil, replace the solenoid rack, and replace the oil. After that I simply reset the adaptive settings and let the transmission re-learn to shift over several hundred miles. In the end it completely resolved all the transmission issues.

I did a decent job keeping the car in good cosmetic shape. A series of pictures I do have comes from a polishing session. Afterwards, I've included the gallery I shot for its sale. I didn't really ever create a sale ad though since as soon as I started tossing around the idea of selling the car I was contacted by a friend who ended up buying it from me.