630i tips

[TuonoV]

Hi,
Anyone here had a BMW 630i? I'm looking at a 2008 on facelift convertible, with the newer style gear selector and the efficient dynamics.

Any issues are annoyances with them to know of?

Also, I see that they introduced the efficient dynamics from this year, but can't actually work out what they've done to drop the emissions. Do these have engine stop/start?

Cheers

[BFleming]

There's a PH buying guide froma few years back here: https://www.pistonheads.com/features/ph-buying-gui...
Ac far as I know start/stop did not feature on these cars.

[naturalaspiration]

Facelift 630i has among other things a direct injection engine N53 hence lower emissions. Compared to the old N52 it has a fair share of problems such as leaky injectors, troublesome coil packs and NOx sensors. All fixable with revised units. So in essence it's a very good engine let down by BMWs not that steep learning curve on direct injection petrol engines.

Not sure on this but it is possible that early ones had issues with high pressure fuel pumps - this was a well publicised issue with turbo charged N54 - I would speculate that their pumps should not differ much. Happily stand corrected though.

As to the leaky injectors you need to make sure they have been upgraded to revision (index) 11 and most critically make sure there is no cylinder bore wash due to undetected injectors leak (oil consumption and compression issue, smoke).

NOx emulators can be bought here:
https://bimmerprofs.com/

I have just bought (collecting soon) but an 06 (convertible) with the port injection N52 engine with added bonus of being LPG-able.

[BFleming]

Would those N53 issues still be lurking on an 11 year old car, or most likely have manifested themselves already?

[naturalaspiration]

I would buy cars like these with eyes wide open. If you have someone with INPA and knows how to use it that would help. And you can easily check the injectors - the index is stamped on them. Ideally there should be a record off all important job done ideally corroborated with an invoice.
If none of the above applied I would take the car to an indie for a piece of mind.
Also if it has a panoramic roof the drains tend to get blocked so it's a good preventative measure to inspect and clean them - not a show stopper obviously.

[TuonoV]

Cheers guys that's all really handy stuff.

I think that I'm erring to getting an independent inspection done prior to buying.

I was thinking about getting a 'Carly' or similar diagnostics tool, I had one for the land rover I've just sold, and it was so useful being able to see what the cars computers are showing, it should give an indication of any issues.

I'll go and do some research into the injectors!

[BFleming]

I find Carly slow & not very good for diagnostics; INPA a lot better as mentioned above, and probably cheaper.

[parabolica]

BFleming said:

I find Carly slow & not very good for diagnostics; INPA a lot better as mentioned above, and probably cheaper.

Doesn't INPA only run on Windows XP machines or older?

[naturalaspiration]

I am running Win XP on Oracle's Virtual Box (free) hosted on my laptop with Win 10 64bit. After playing around with virtual machine's usb settings and usb drivers for the cable all well and good.

Edited by naturalaspiration on Thursday 11th July 16:24

[BFleming]

parabolica said:

Doesn't INPA only run on Windows XP machines or older?

I run it on a Toshiba laptop I bought off ebay for £20 running Windows 7. But running a virtualised instance of older Windows (as per the above post) is probably the more efficient way of doing it!