Buying A Cheap BMW E46 Project Car
It overheated on the test drive, but this $1,500 BMW clearly had potential.
I was antsy to get into an E46, and I blame Chelsea DeNofa for it. After watching his How to Drift video series, I was hooked on the idea of sliding an E46 around. My S13 240sx was beyond clapped out, and sharing seat time in it with my room mate and co-owner at the time was getting less and less appealing as we continued to get better at drifting. So, I fixated on buying a cheap E46 for drift duty.
After a few weeks of daily Craigslist surfing, I found a car that caught my eye. A 1999 BMW 328i 5-speed being sold by the original owner, the ad was lackluster, with poorly-taken images and the air of someone who was tired of dealing with an old German car. Perfect. I contacted the owner and arranged for a time to meet up and inspect the car. His last words stood out: “I’ll meet you at the country club tomorrow at 2.” The country club? This was bound to be good.
And the next day I was slogging through the clogged intestines that are LA’s freeways, going from Long Beach to Glendale to look at a two decade old European car with over 200,000 miles on the odometer. The traffic was especially bad as it was a weekday. My boss was so bemused at the idea of me buying another terrible old car that he gave me the day off, said to send pics and let him know how it went. And, man, did it not go well, at least, at first.
I arrived at the country club in Project Civic Si, with a friend riding shotgun so that I had a way to get both cars home. We felt a bit conspicuous waiting in the country club parking lot, with old timers rolling past in golf carts eyeing up my decidedly non-premium branded ride. Hopefully we didn’t drop the neighborhood property values too much for them.
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A few minutes later, the E46 rolled into view, and what a sight it was. The jet black paint had been neglected to the point of having turned gray, and the driver fender and bumper corner showed signs of a very obvious poor repair. The owner relayed to us that he had just picked up a brand new 2017 BMW 3-series and no longer needed the old E46 here.
We popped the hood and revved up the M52TU 2.8-liter straight-six. The engine revved quietly and smoothly, so quietly, in fact, that all anyone could hear was the mechanical fan. Next up was the jack, jack stands and flash light treatment. E46s are popular platforms for modifiers, drifters and racers, but are very prone to a number to chassis-related issues. The most common being the rear chassis panel tearing apart from the subframe mounts due to abuse, old age, old bushings and a poor design. Fortunately, no cracks or torn sheet metal could be seen.
Everything checked out on paper for a cheap, old BMW, but the test drive was a little less smooth. The 5-speed shifter was floppy and vague, but an even bigger issue occurred about 15 seconds into the test drive when the temp gauge went straight to the red. We pulled over just outside the country club and popped the hood.
It was here that the seller decided let us know that the car was on engine #2 because the first one overheated and blew up. Right… He claimed that along with replacing the engine, his mechanic replaced the entire cooling system, and that it had never overheated again after that. Right…
Let’s start with the basics. Was there any coolant left in it? Well, one extremely careful removal of the scalding hot expansion tank cap confirmed that with a powerful gush of 200° coolant that there was, in fact, some coolant circulating through the engine. Next, I checked the heater. If the heater doesn’t blow hot air there could be air trapped in the cooling system causing hot spots. Sure enough, despite having idled and been driven for a while, no heat was coming out of the vents.
We ushered the car’s owner back to the country club and told him to bring as much water as possible. A few minutes later he returned with a bunch of tiny cups from the gold course filled with water from the course’s coolers. Along with it came an immediately reduced price. “If you can fix this thing and take it home, I would feel very comfortable selling it for $1,500.” Done deal. A few minutes later, with the cooling system bled of any air bubbles, the car drove without issue to the bank, where the money, paperwork and title were exchanged. I now owned a nearly two decade old BMW with shoddy paint, over 214,000 miles on the odometer and that had just overheated moments before.
Oh, and make that 215,000 miles, because the odometer turned over the figure on the extremely uneventful drive home. The car behaved perfectly, with the temp gauge dead center, even in Los Angeles’ worst rush hour traffic. The air conditioning was ice cold, the Harman Kardon audio was surprisingly good and everything in the car worked. It was all very odd for an old, cheap BMW.
The long term plan for the car is a transformation into a super reliable drift car that can drive to and from events with relative comfort and kick ass all day on track. Short term plans include fixing everything else wrong or otherwise worn out on this old Bimmer, and there are definitely a lot of areas for improvement. Stay tuned…
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