What’s the best smelling car you’ve ever been in? For Shed, it’s a dead heat between any car that Mrs Shed hasn’t been in. For the seller of this week’s shed it’s his 1997 BMW E39 528.
No 23-year-old car could still be retaining its factory pong (could it?) so you’d think that the fragrance of this one must be down to something the owner has been doing. Or not doing. Then again, according to the ad anyway, this car does have the extraordinarily rare option of leather carpets.
Funny how we’ve been conditioned to think that leather smells nice. Try telling that to a dairy farmer. What does smell nice is the stuff they treat upholstery leather with. If we could infuse our pov-spec cloth cabins with some of that, we could all enjoy the luxurious sensation of leather without the downside of sliding around all over the place on twisty routes.
Anyway, back to the car. We had a 530 E39 in here at the end of January and we could easily have had an equally nice E39 last week. That was a Touring that we had to skip for operational reasons. Point being that the supply of excellent E39s seems to be under no threat whatsoever. Low prices reflect the rich availability and not the value, which is tremendous for buyers if not sellers.
Why sell one, then? In this case it's so that the owner can get into towing. His needs become your win because even at £1,495 this one looks like quite a catch. Low miles, little use since the last MOT in June ’19, and only a couple of advisories for low front brake pads and slightly weepy power steering. We all get a little weepy sometimes, especially when that nice Philip Schofield comes on the telly with his cute puppy, and PAS fluid leaks are totally par for the course with E39s. The reservoir lid seal goes and the clips that hold the hoses in place ideally need to be replaced with Jubilee clips. Sort that and you’ll be the proud owner of a great BMW saloon in apparently great condition, powered by arguably the best all-round 5 Series engine even when it isn't bolted up to a manual gearbox, as it isn’t here.
But what about the other faults listed in the ad? ‘Aircon could do with a regas’ usually translates into ‘aircon needs a new compressor’. That will cost you between £200 and £300, depending on the make. You could always gamble £50 on a regas to start with. You never know, for the first time in recorded history it might even work. Or you could just survive without AC, as the overwhelming majority of Brits do in their homes. Shed can count on one gnarly old hand the number of times he’s really needed AC in his car, and on each of those occasions he was abroad, cursing the weather.
Temperamental PDC parking sensors can of course be permanently fixed by a frenzied and sustained sledgehammer attack on the whole bumper assembly. For a more considered solution, a new set of sensors off t’internet will be less than twenty quid. You can tell if one of your existing sensors is bust by turning the ignition key into the second (non-starting) position, putting the car into reverse, and then bending over at the back to see if any of the sensors isn’t making the correct ticking noise. If one isn’t, switch it with one of the others, listen again, and hope it doesn’t then start ticking, because if it does that means there’s a wiring issue.
You could pay a BMW dealer to carry out that bending-over test, but you’ll still be metaphorically bending over in that case because they’ll be charging you £100 or so for that. Again, Shed would advise ignoring it altogether. If you’re determined to fix it yourself the only solution is to watch tedious American YouTube vids showing you how easy it is to do that at home. All you need is the right tools, a nice warm climate and/or garage, time to burn, and the patience of a saint.
If these are the worst of this E39’s problems, then you really haven't got a problem. Get it while it’s smelly.
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