E39 M5 "values"

[akirk]

RichardM5 said:

akirk said:

mine is late-ish (Oct) 2002 build, early 2003 registered 52 plate not sure how that fits in...

That's not an 03 plate car then, but it is a 2003 model year, so will have a Mk IV Nav (if it has Nav) and could have had Bluetooth phone from new.

Mine was built at a similar time, but not registered until March 2003, so it is an 03 plate, it is also a 2003 MY.

yup - 52 plate, not 03, but is still a 2003 car officially, and model year 03 so does have the Mk IV Nav and Bluetooth etc (iphone 7 connected without issue) seems to have virtually every extra added you could think of and is in superb condition...

I was thinking more about the balance of numbers mentioned above, because I guess that time of build v. time of registration starts to separate more on the run-out models of any car as sales slow down

Edited by akirk on Friday 16th June 10:28

[e21Mark]

M5 London said:

Welshbeef said:

Supercharged E39 M5 ..... wowzers. They sound bloody lovely standard and are fairly fast out of he box but supercharged that's probably F10 M5 fast with a stick shifter.

They are nice indeed ! I have done about 60,000 miles since I supercharged my one. I drove it NA for about 25,000 Miles.

Its earned a well deserved engine rebuild now, at about 175,000 miles.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to drive my one back to back with my M6 Gran Coupe though, but gut feeling is the M6 is quicker (but I am running a fair bit more Hp/Lb.Ft than a stock car) and the gap would keep increasing the further you went past 140/150 mph. The DCT gearbox is just ridiculously quick and I also tend not to shift too fast in the E39 M5, purely for some mechanical sympathy...So that would be the main reason the M6 will start pulling away as the speed starts piling on.

However when I do finally get the E39 M5's engine rebuilt it will be packing some serious PUNCH.

Oh and RichardM5's 2002 E39 M5 is probably going to be nicer than ANY 2003 E39 M5

Edited by M5 London on Tuesday 13th June 14:51

Pal of mine has a supercharged one and also runs Ethanol. He was thinking of selling at one point but managed to talk him out of it.

[M5 London]

e21Mark said:

Pal of mine has a supercharged one and also runs Ethanol. He was thinking of selling at one point but managed to talk him out of it.

Nice one Mark. Interestingly I run Water / Methanol injection. Mainly for some extra cooling of the intake charge and some added octane too.


Richard : I know your car is an 03 and can't work out why I stated it was an 02....ooops sorry !

[PowerslideSWE]

I just got one, it's has a post in the readers rides part of the forum if anyone is interested.

Regarding the prices, I can't speak for the UK, but good examples here (Sweden) have gained between £4-5000 in the last few years while even ropey ones are conciderably more expensive than just a year ago.

I payed 175000 swedish for mine, which is around £14800, so it's on the more expensive area price wise in Sweden atm, but it has nearly the same amount as the purchase price spent on it by the PO in the last 3 years. It's not strictly OEM as it sits atm, but will be put back to standard little by little during my ownership. It's most likely the only one sold new in Sweden in Imola red with the F2AT nappa/alcantara upholstery. The owner history isn't all that great tbh, but it has a clean title and has not been in any accident according to Swedish DVLA.

As it sits:

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Wednesday 21st June 18:06

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Wednesday 21st June 18:07

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Wednesday 21st June 18:12

[akirk]

Very nice - why not start a reader's thread and show us how you put it back to OE.
Lovely cars - mine is sitting on the drive awaiting a new windscreen - company came out to replace it today and brought the wrong glass... so not using it at the moment (fortunately have a soft-top for this weather anyway!)

[PowerslideSWE]

akirk said:

Very nice - why not start a reader's thread and show us how you put it back to OE.
Lovely cars - mine is sitting on the drive awaiting a new windscreen - company came out to replace it today and brought the wrong glass... so not using it at the moment (fortunately have a soft-top for this weather anyway!)

Thnx

I have a readers thread on it. It'll be a long process, not that it is that much to do, first order of business is to source a set of Style 65's, that has proven more difficult than I imagined. The Bilstein coilovers are brand new, so they'll stay, OE Struts are in my garage on a shelf, so I still have those. Then it's the interiour bits, so if anyone has a Titan-line center console for sale, give me a shout. Engine will stay as is until I need to replace valve cover gaskets etc, and they are brand new, so that'll be a while aswell.

[M5 London]

Lovely acquisition !

I was reading your thread the other day and I feel you have picked up a very clean one.

Not sure how much experience you have with these cars but I would advise picking up a Peake Code reader and / or getting INPA setup on a laptop for your diagnostics.

Engines are strong, save for rod bearing and timing chain guide failure, either of which will result in a very big bill.

Imola Red is awesome !

Best of luck with her......one of these best performance saloon cars ever made.

[akirk]

duh, didn't twig! very nice car

[PowerslideSWE]

M5 London said:

Lovely acquisition !

I was reading your thread the other day and I feel you have picked up a very clean one.

Not sure how much experience you have with these cars but I would advise picking up a Peake Code reader and / or getting INPA setup on a laptop for your diagnostics.

Engines are strong, save for rod bearing and timing chain guide failure, either of which will result in a very big bill.

Imola Red is awesome !

Best of luck with her......one of these best performance saloon cars ever made.

I have INPA/BMW-Scanner on a laptop, but couldnt get bmw scanner to work over the obd port, is it the big round one in the enginebay on the pre-fl's?

I've read alot about both failures, and it seems that rod bearings do happen, at various miles at that, mine has full BMWSH so it should be ok oil wise, but it has had quite a few owners, and they might have been rude to the engine when cold, who knows? Guides are apparently way more rare to fail due to a completely different designt than on the M62 and MUCH lower operating temps, but even they do fail, but it's more of an internet folklore?

[TheAngryDog]

PowerslideSWE said:

M5 London said:

Lovely acquisition !

I was reading your thread the other day and I feel you have picked up a very clean one.

Not sure how much experience you have with these cars but I would advise picking up a Peake Code reader and / or getting INPA setup on a laptop for your diagnostics.

Engines are strong, save for rod bearing and timing chain guide failure, either of which will result in a very big bill.

Imola Red is awesome !

Best of luck with her......one of these best performance saloon cars ever made.

I have INPA/BMW-Scanner on a laptop, but couldnt get bmw scanner to work over the obd port, is it the big round one in the enginebay on the pre-fl's?

I've read alot about both failures, and it seems that rod bearings do happen, at various miles at that, mine has full BMWSH so it should be ok oil wise, but it has had quite a few owners, and they might have been rude to the engine when cold, who knows? Guides are apparently way more rare to fail due to a completely different designt than on the M62 and MUCH lower operating temps, but even they do fail, but it's more of an internet folklore?

I've seen / heard of a few fail (both guides and bearings). It is not unheard of but I do not think its overly common either. There are quite a few high mileage cars out there running just fine with neither being changed. Mine is on 144k and on original bearings and guides. You could get an oil sample test done to see how much metal is in your oil, but this isn't 100% conclusive unless there is a st load of metal in it.

[Patrick Bateman]

The next owner of mine had both those jobs done at CPC.

The car was on about 160k miles and the guides had started to break up. That being said, who's to say how long before that actually ended up causing problems. The bearings looked like this-



Which was apparently ridiculously good, the car didn't have a running in service either.

Doing both at the same time (chain as well) would see you down about £2500 at CPC.

Edited by Patrick Bateman on Thursday 22 June 16:35

[TheAngryDog]

Patrick Bateman said:

Doing both at the same time (chain as well) would see you down about £2500 at CPC.

Edited by Patrick Bateman on Thursday 22 June 16:35

Interesting, I've been quoted £3500 elsewhere....

[Patrick Bateman]

TheAngryDog said:

Interesting, I've been quoted £3500 elsewhere....

Make that closer to £2250. That estimate includes an anti-rattle kit so I'd not bother with that.

The fact Phil at CPC probably knows these better than anyone in the country means he's likely to be quicker and therefore cheaper. It's like any mechanical job, if you're familiar with it you're always going to be more efficient than someone who's doing it for the first time or only done a couple.

[PowerslideSWE]

Mine has "only" done 88000 miles so it should be safe for a while. Sub £2500 is a very reasonable price for all that, if st were to hit the fan on mine it might be cheaper for me to take the car to the UK than to do the work here..

[TheAngryDog]

Patrick Bateman said:

Make that closer to £2250. That estimate includes an anti-rattle kit so I'd not bother with that.

The fact Phil at CPC probably knows these better than anyone in the country means he's likely to be quicker and therefore cheaper. It's like any mechanical job, if you're familiar with it you're always going to be more efficient than someone who's doing it for the first time or only done a couple.

Thats not too bad tbh. I was quoted £3200 by Mr VANOS (Thought it was £3500)

Mr VANOS said:

The total cost for, all 3 chains, tensioners and guides, vanos units reconditioned and plates/gear, rod bearings with ARP bolts is £3200 inc VAT.

That also included 8 new VANOS solenoids as well.

[M5 London]

PowerslideSWE said:

M5 London said:

Lovely acquisition !

I was reading your thread the other day and I feel you have picked up a very clean one.

Not sure how much experience you have with these cars but I would advise picking up a Peake Code reader and / or getting INPA setup on a laptop for your diagnostics.

Engines are strong, save for rod bearing and timing chain guide failure, either of which will result in a very big bill.

Imola Red is awesome !

Best of luck with her......one of these best performance saloon cars ever made.

I have INPA/BMW-Scanner on a laptop, but couldnt get bmw scanner to work over the obd port, is it the big round one in the enginebay on the pre-fl's?

I've read alot about both failures, and it seems that rod bearings do happen, at various miles at that, mine has full BMWSH so it should be ok oil wise, but it has had quite a few owners, and they might have been rude to the engine when cold, who knows? Guides are apparently way more rare to fail due to a completely different designt than on the M62 and MUCH lower operating temps, but even they do fail, but it's more of an internet folklore?

As a rule of thumb if the car has both in car port and in engine bay large port then you need to use the engine bay large port.

Some cars like yours and mine had both. Very early ones only had an engine port and later cars didn't have the engine port and only the in car port.

If you do get a Peake Code Reader it will work from inside the car as it only reads Power/ Drivetrain module which is the important one. INPA can read a lot more but will need the engine port for access, I think.


Unfortunately rod bearing failure, it seems, is not a function of total mileage or how regularly you change your oil.

I have seen two of my friends suffer them, both under 40,000 miles and I have heard of 300K Miles car having not suffered.

Obviously I have read about several rod bearing failures over the years on E39 M5s and generally forums are bearers of bad news rather than good and this could be misconstrued into believing that pretty much every E39 M5 is going to kill itself.

Having said that, my advice would be, if the car is a keeper get them done pro actively. A piston trying to escape from the side of the block is not a pretty sight. You could end up needing a new block, pistons, valves and crankshaft ETC ETC ETC. At which point you would need a replacement engine to make any sort of financial sense, but this is a lottery in terms of how good the used engine is and obviously you would be doing rod bearings and timing chain on this replacement engine before fitting it ..... or maybe not, and if not you are subject to the same risk again. Not sure how much replacement engines go for but I reckon sourcing, doing any work to it, removing old one and fitting a new one I'd say is not going to be much less than £6K / £7K all in. Maybe less I don't know.

Also you now do not have an original engine in place. This is always a bit of an issue to me at least.

If the car is not a keeper then decisions become a little easier and hopefully it doesn't grenade during your short term tenure.

Edited by M5 London on Friday 23 June 16:07

[PowerslideSWE]

M5 London said:

As a rule of thumb if the car has both in car port and in engine bay large port then you need to use the engine bay large port.

Some cars like yours and mine had both. Very early ones only had an engine port and later cars didn't have the engine port and only the in car port.

If you do get a Peake Code Reader it will work from inside the car as it only reads Power/ Drivetrain module which is the important one. INPA can read a lot more but will need the engine port for access, I think.


Unfortunately rod bearing failure, it seems, is not a function of total mileage or how regularly you change your oil.

I have seen two of my friends suffer them, both under 40,000 miles and I have heard of 300K Miles car having not suffered.

Obviously I have read about several rod bearing failures over the years on E39 M5s and generally forums are bearers of bad news rather than good and this could be misconstrued into believing that pretty much every E39 M5 is going to kill itself.

Having said that, my advice would be, if the car is a keeper get them done pro actively. A piston trying to escape from the side of the block is not a pretty sight. You could end up needing a new block, pistons, valves and crankshaft ETC ETC ETC. At which point you would need a replacement engine to make any sort of financial sense, but this is a lottery in terms of how good the used engine is and obviously you would be doing rod bearings and timing chain on this replacement engine before fitting it ..... or maybe not, and if not you are subject to the same risk again. Not sure how much replacement engines go for but I reckon sourcing, doing any work to it, removing old one and fitting a new one I'd say is not going to be much less than £6K / £7K all in. Maybe less I don't know.

Also you now do not have an original engine in place. This is always a bit of an issue to me at least.

If the car is not a keeper then decisions become a little easier and hopefully it doesn't grenade during your short term tenure.

Edited by M5 London on Friday 23 June 16:07

Thanks for the imput, I'm new to these cars in patricular so I soak up all the info that I can.

As you said, the pro-active route would financially be the best approach if the car is indeed a keeper.. I've yet to decide whether it is or not. The reason I bought this one it for the sheer about of work done to it both cosmetically (I exclude the wheels...) and internally, lots done to the engine and the rest of the drive train etc, and I got it relatively cheap, especially when you concider said work done, reciepts of over £10.000 since 2014, and that is in parts alone, not labour. As far as I can tell looking through the history, the car has the original engine, nothing suggests otherwise.

But if I'm honest, as a long term keeper I would like a car with a much better ownership history and a more subtle color. Something like an Oxford green over black heritage with the most equipment you could possibly fit, like full leather, alcantara roof etc, and a late one at that. The latter is very very hard to find in Sweden if you want a car that was sold here. Only 11 02's and one 03 were sold here and even the 01's were rare, well, the car is rare here period, with only 166 sold in total..

There is of course the european import route to go down, but that complicates things, harder to check up history, milage etc.

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Saturday 24th June 11:15

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Saturday 24th June 11:16

[JD2329]

PowerslideSWE said:

M5 London said:

As a rule of thumb if the car has both in car port and in engine bay large port then you need to use the engine bay large port.

Some cars like yours and mine had both. Very early ones only had an engine port and later cars didn't have the engine port and only the in car port.

If you do get a Peake Code Reader it will work from inside the car as it only reads Power/ Drivetrain module which is the important one. INPA can read a lot more but will need the engine port for access, I think.


Unfortunately rod bearing failure, it seems, is not a function of total mileage or how regularly you change your oil.

I have seen two of my friends suffer them, both under 40,000 miles and I have heard of 300K Miles car having not suffered.

Obviously I have read about several rod bearing failures over the years on E39 M5s and generally forums are bearers of bad news rather than good and this could be misconstrued into believing that pretty much every E39 M5 is going to kill itself.

Having said that, my advice would be, if the car is a keeper get them done pro actively. A piston trying to escape from the side of the block is not a pretty sight. You could end up needing a new block, pistons, valves and crankshaft ETC ETC ETC. At which point you would need a replacement engine to make any sort of financial sense, but this is a lottery in terms of how good the used engine is and obviously you would be doing rod bearings and timing chain on this replacement engine before fitting it ..... or maybe not, and if not you are subject to the same risk again. Not sure how much replacement engines go for but I reckon sourcing, doing any work to it, removing old one and fitting a new one I'd say is not going to be much less than £6K / £7K all in. Maybe less I don't know.

Also you now do not have an original engine in place. This is always a bit of an issue to me at least.

If the car is not a keeper then decisions become a little easier and hopefully it doesn't grenade during your short term tenure.

Edited by M5 London on Friday 23 June 16:07

Thanks for the imput, I'm new to these cars in patricular so I soak up all the info that I can.

As you said, the pro-active route would financially be the best approach if the car is indeed a keeper.. I've yet to decide whether it is or not. The reason I bought this one it for the sheer about of work done to it both cosmetically (I exclude the wheels...) and internally, lots done to the engine and the rest of the drive train etc, and I got it relatively cheap, especially when you concider said work done, reciepts of over £10.000 since 2014, and that is in parts alone, not labour. As far as I can tell looking through the history, the car has the original engine, nothing suggests otherwise.

But if I'm honest, as a long term keeper I would like a car with a much better ownership history and a more subtle color. Something like an Oxford green over black heritage with the most equipment you could possibly fit, like full leather, alcantara roof etc, and a late one at that. The latter is very very hard to find in Sweden if you want a car that was sold here. Only 11 02's and one 03 were sold here and even the 01's were rare, well, the car is rare here period, with only 166 sold in total..

There is of course the european import route to go down, but that complicates things, harder to check up history, milage etc.

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Saturday 24th June 11:15

Edited by PowerslideSWE on Saturday 24th June 11:16

I am sure style of ownership has a lot to do with rod bearings going at quite low mileages - i.e. cars that have not been warmed up properly and seen a lot of action over 6000rpm. There's always luck involved but I'd echo the sentiments above and if in doubt get them done.

[jamoor]

Patrick Bateman said:

Make that closer to £2250. That estimate includes an anti-rattle kit so I'd not bother with that.

The fact Phil at CPC probably knows these better than anyone in the country means he's likely to be quicker and therefore cheaper. It's like any mechanical job, if you're familiar with it you're always going to be more efficient than someone who's doing it for the first time or only done a couple.

I've done this job myself, for anyone doing it for the first time it's probably 15 hours work

[Mike_C]

Thought I'd revive this thread as I've always fancied an E39 M5, but having a look around and any good-condition car with <100k miles on the clock is in the region of £25k-£40k now! Such cars were <£10k 5 years ago, so...are they worth it? Have they peaked, or will they follow E46 CSL prices, which peaked and then have dropped dramatically again? Or will they continue to rise?