I have a BMW issue, well 2 of them now. Leggy 520d content!
Discussion
Serial PH'er and repeat BMW offender, hello.
My current fleet of despair includes another BMW, an F21 M140i that I bought with the best intentions of running as a reliable daily and leaving alone, however I'm generally terrible so it's now like trigger's broom and has 630bhp and a 116d badge on the boot. You can read about it here if you'd like to: 600bhp 1 Series
For the past couple of years I've been cutting about in Fiat Panda's for a daily driver. I'm pretty awful at leaving things alone so you can read about me doing many un-necessary things to Fiat Panda's here if you'd like as well: Pandau Ballet - A Study in Economical Motoring
Sadly the mighty Panda died recently. I have had a change in work circumstances so whereas previously it has made sense to run as cheap a car as possible and benefit the most from the 45p a mile I can claim, my work mileage is going to drop to pretty much zero so I'll only have a bit of commuting to deal with. It should drop my annual mileage from 20k-24k PA to around 6k PA. With this in mind I decided to take a break from Panda life and move onto pastures new, ideally something with cruise control and a few more creature comforts. I've previously been a serial owner of Jaguar and Land Rover products (XJ40 / X300 / X308) and (Classic / P38 / L322), so I took to Auto Trader / Gumtree / Facebook Marketplace and generally anywhere else to have a look around.
I considered X350 diesel's (love a crank snappage) and 3.0 V6's, and I looked at risky 3.6 TDV8's as my preference of L322's, but honestly I feel like I just really like a BMW so I started to look at these again, mainly 5 series for a bit of room and tourings because I have a bit of a thing for an estate.
I didn't want to spend very much really as the Panda expired 2 weeks before Christmas, less than ideal by anyone's standards let alone when your mortgage came off it's fixed 1.85% rate the same month and jumped 47%
Sigh.
I had my heart set on an E61 520/30d. Ideally a 30d. I think they're a great looking car, but they're at that weird point in the market / life cycle where they can be had for £800 or £6000 and the quality of the car can vary wildly at the mercy of the sellers perception of what a good car is.
The wife unit was assisting in the search for a car and turned up something just along the road from us. We're around 30 miles north of Newcastle and she sent me an advert for a car in Newport in Wales. Then replied, "ah, it's probably a bit high mileage forget it".
The ad was for a late 2012 F11 520d M Sport, it was terrible and had few details, but the pictures piqued my interest and I rang the seller. To complete the list of red flags for a car found on Gumtree at the other end of the country, the seller was a Romanian chap called Vasile who spoke broken English at best and wasn't really sure what I was asking. I immediately transferred him a deposit and arranged to drive down after the weekend to collect it.
On Monday morning my long suffering wife drove me 325 miles to Newport to look at an old 5 series. This is top wife behaviour at the best of times, however it's worth noting that I was attempting to buy an E61 in 2019 and went to both London and Bournemouth on seperate occasions for cars that both turned out to be lemons and came away empty handed. She is indeed a trooper.
Vasile turned out to be an absolute gentleman. It was far easier to talk in person and it turned out the car had been in his family for 6 years and was his dad's car, but his dad had returned home to Romania and Vasile had an X5 30d he preferred so he was selling it on. The car had a lot of history, and most importantly had had the notorious N47 timing chains done, along with sprockets, tensioners, etc and also a turbocharger and EGR system 15k miles ago to the tune of £3,157.00.
There's been a lot of waffle and few pictures, so this was the first picture of the car I took after I collected it:
It's a bit of a weird spec car, but it's very me. It's a deep metallic blue that looks black in most lights, but it's not carbon black, I forget the name I'll post it later, but over Oyster dakota leather which is very me with anthracite wood inlays. It's got adaptive xenon headlights, heated and folding mirrors, heated seats, cruise, auto main beam, power tailgate, 19" Style M351's, split 40/20/40 folding seats and the ZF8 Sports Auto box with paddle shift. Sadly poverty nav though, more on that later.
I took this at it's first fill up and it gives a slightly better idea of the range of blue in the colour:
So...
What's the catch.
It's just ticked over 203,000 miles when I collected it
It drives really really nicely. Everything appears to work, the interior has worn well and the history is extensive. The majority of the miles appear to have been racked up when it was owned by a glass fitting firm and it was doing 36-40k a year. It was being serviced twice a year and getting a set of tyres every 9 months at this point, all the receipts are in the history file.
In addition to the recent engine work, it's also had airbags on the rear in the last 2 years and the air suspension compressor replaced in May 2023. It came with almost 12 months MOT and I paid £3,400 for it which I think was robbery.
....until I got home and it started to smoke badly
It turns out the cam cover gasket failed which is a fairly common issue on these it seems and probably because it's been stood for a while then I put best part of 650 miles on it in 4 days. I sourced genuine replacement gaskets and injector O-Rings from BMW:
One of my best pals started up in BMW Performance mods when we both got 140's, Williams Performance, and because he's a bit of a legend he's happy to lend me a ramp now and again as needed, so I whacked the old girl on a lift and had a poke about before changing the gasket and doing a full service for piece of mind. Underneath is very clean. One of the front rubber jacking points is missing so I've ordered one.
I was really pleased when I pulled the cam cover off and saw the condition of the engine:
It's really clean with literally no sludge build up, so it clearly has been serviced to the standard of the paperwork that came with the car. The interior needs a bit of a clean up but the leather has worn really well and I think it will clean up well. I'm addressing the poverty nav and I'm planning on changing it out with either a pro nav retrofit and CarPlay activation or an Android based system to do the same thing
It also has a ding in the bootlid which I'm hoping will come out easily enough, we shall see. I think someone has opened the power boot into something.
All in all though, I've done nearly 1000 miles in it now and it seems brilliant. I've swapped my plate on and given in a bit of a clean, it's going to get a machine polish and I've just ordered a set of 4 Michelin PS4's as it's got mix matched rubbish on it at the moment, I'm going to get the wheels refurbed at the same time and hopefully it'll scrub up pretty well and have a lot of life left in her yet. Sit's nicely with the 116d!
My current fleet of despair includes another BMW, an F21 M140i that I bought with the best intentions of running as a reliable daily and leaving alone, however I'm generally terrible so it's now like trigger's broom and has 630bhp and a 116d badge on the boot. You can read about it here if you'd like to: 600bhp 1 Series
For the past couple of years I've been cutting about in Fiat Panda's for a daily driver. I'm pretty awful at leaving things alone so you can read about me doing many un-necessary things to Fiat Panda's here if you'd like as well: Pandau Ballet - A Study in Economical Motoring
Sadly the mighty Panda died recently. I have had a change in work circumstances so whereas previously it has made sense to run as cheap a car as possible and benefit the most from the 45p a mile I can claim, my work mileage is going to drop to pretty much zero so I'll only have a bit of commuting to deal with. It should drop my annual mileage from 20k-24k PA to around 6k PA. With this in mind I decided to take a break from Panda life and move onto pastures new, ideally something with cruise control and a few more creature comforts. I've previously been a serial owner of Jaguar and Land Rover products (XJ40 / X300 / X308) and (Classic / P38 / L322), so I took to Auto Trader / Gumtree / Facebook Marketplace and generally anywhere else to have a look around.
I considered X350 diesel's (love a crank snappage) and 3.0 V6's, and I looked at risky 3.6 TDV8's as my preference of L322's, but honestly I feel like I just really like a BMW so I started to look at these again, mainly 5 series for a bit of room and tourings because I have a bit of a thing for an estate.
I didn't want to spend very much really as the Panda expired 2 weeks before Christmas, less than ideal by anyone's standards let alone when your mortgage came off it's fixed 1.85% rate the same month and jumped 47%
Sigh.I had my heart set on an E61 520/30d. Ideally a 30d. I think they're a great looking car, but they're at that weird point in the market / life cycle where they can be had for £800 or £6000 and the quality of the car can vary wildly at the mercy of the sellers perception of what a good car is.
The wife unit was assisting in the search for a car and turned up something just along the road from us. We're around 30 miles north of Newcastle and she sent me an advert for a car in Newport in Wales. Then replied, "ah, it's probably a bit high mileage forget it".
The ad was for a late 2012 F11 520d M Sport, it was terrible and had few details, but the pictures piqued my interest and I rang the seller. To complete the list of red flags for a car found on Gumtree at the other end of the country, the seller was a Romanian chap called Vasile who spoke broken English at best and wasn't really sure what I was asking. I immediately transferred him a deposit and arranged to drive down after the weekend to collect it.
On Monday morning my long suffering wife drove me 325 miles to Newport to look at an old 5 series. This is top wife behaviour at the best of times, however it's worth noting that I was attempting to buy an E61 in 2019 and went to both London and Bournemouth on seperate occasions for cars that both turned out to be lemons and came away empty handed. She is indeed a trooper.
Vasile turned out to be an absolute gentleman. It was far easier to talk in person and it turned out the car had been in his family for 6 years and was his dad's car, but his dad had returned home to Romania and Vasile had an X5 30d he preferred so he was selling it on. The car had a lot of history, and most importantly had had the notorious N47 timing chains done, along with sprockets, tensioners, etc and also a turbocharger and EGR system 15k miles ago to the tune of £3,157.00.
There's been a lot of waffle and few pictures, so this was the first picture of the car I took after I collected it:
It's a bit of a weird spec car, but it's very me. It's a deep metallic blue that looks black in most lights, but it's not carbon black, I forget the name I'll post it later, but over Oyster dakota leather which is very me with anthracite wood inlays. It's got adaptive xenon headlights, heated and folding mirrors, heated seats, cruise, auto main beam, power tailgate, 19" Style M351's, split 40/20/40 folding seats and the ZF8 Sports Auto box with paddle shift. Sadly poverty nav though, more on that later.
I took this at it's first fill up and it gives a slightly better idea of the range of blue in the colour:
So...
What's the catch.
It's just ticked over 203,000 miles when I collected it
It drives really really nicely. Everything appears to work, the interior has worn well and the history is extensive. The majority of the miles appear to have been racked up when it was owned by a glass fitting firm and it was doing 36-40k a year. It was being serviced twice a year and getting a set of tyres every 9 months at this point, all the receipts are in the history file.
In addition to the recent engine work, it's also had airbags on the rear in the last 2 years and the air suspension compressor replaced in May 2023. It came with almost 12 months MOT and I paid £3,400 for it which I think was robbery.
....until I got home and it started to smoke badly
It turns out the cam cover gasket failed which is a fairly common issue on these it seems and probably because it's been stood for a while then I put best part of 650 miles on it in 4 days. I sourced genuine replacement gaskets and injector O-Rings from BMW:
One of my best pals started up in BMW Performance mods when we both got 140's, Williams Performance, and because he's a bit of a legend he's happy to lend me a ramp now and again as needed, so I whacked the old girl on a lift and had a poke about before changing the gasket and doing a full service for piece of mind. Underneath is very clean. One of the front rubber jacking points is missing so I've ordered one.
I was really pleased when I pulled the cam cover off and saw the condition of the engine:
It's really clean with literally no sludge build up, so it clearly has been serviced to the standard of the paperwork that came with the car. The interior needs a bit of a clean up but the leather has worn really well and I think it will clean up well. I'm addressing the poverty nav and I'm planning on changing it out with either a pro nav retrofit and CarPlay activation or an Android based system to do the same thing
It also has a ding in the bootlid which I'm hoping will come out easily enough, we shall see. I think someone has opened the power boot into something.
All in all though, I've done nearly 1000 miles in it now and it seems brilliant. I've swapped my plate on and given in a bit of a clean, it's going to get a machine polish and I've just ordered a set of 4 Michelin PS4's as it's got mix matched rubbish on it at the moment, I'm going to get the wheels refurbed at the same time and hopefully it'll scrub up pretty well and have a lot of life left in her yet. Sit's nicely with the 116d!
Edited by D4MJT on Friday 5th January 20:21
Looks like a good buy that- my parents had a facelift F10 520d (Alpine White/Black Dakota Leather)- the main complaints they had about it were the gutless reverse gear and the fact that you could end up doing 95mph down the M42 without realising it, so all in all a pretty bloody good car... I was about 19 when they got rid of it and probably would've killed for a chance to drive it at the time.
Love the spec on yours- BMW always do a good metallic blue (think yours could be Imperial Blue?) and with the cream leather that's a great combo. The basic nav has always really let the F10 interior down so will be great to see that rectified, and to be honest I've never liked the pre-LCI steering wheel either, but the F1x is probably one of the best BMW interiors IMO. Amazed at how clean the top end is too, could easily pass that off as an engine that's done 20k, not 200k... would be willing to bet it has another 200k in it!
Love the spec on yours- BMW always do a good metallic blue (think yours could be Imperial Blue?) and with the cream leather that's a great combo. The basic nav has always really let the F10 interior down so will be great to see that rectified, and to be honest I've never liked the pre-LCI steering wheel either, but the F1x is probably one of the best BMW interiors IMO. Amazed at how clean the top end is too, could easily pass that off as an engine that's done 20k, not 200k... would be willing to bet it has another 200k in it!
I do like the F11; such a good shape and the Style 351M alloys suit the car best IMO 
I ran them on my F01 with 15mm spacers so they sat right as the offsets for the 7'er a more aggressive than the F11
Had them fully refurbed in Platinum Silver; superb colour
I reckon that colour would suit your F11 really well too
I ran them on my F01 with 15mm spacers so they sat right as the offsets for the 7'er a more aggressive than the F11
Had them fully refurbed in Platinum Silver; superb colour
I reckon that colour would suit your F11 really well too
Ideal car to buy in my eyes, mileage is no issue when it’s been taken care of. Having the chain and airbags done is the big one in my eyes. As you say, the engine looks good for the mileage and it has a nice spec. Xenon’s and a good colour combo are high priorities on an F10/11. Hope it brings many miles of joy.
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