Quote:
Originally Posted by Tishers
Not a big fan of condition-based-maintenance and lifetime fluids. If you are only going to keep a car for 3-6 years and get a new one when your lease runs out or you have finished paying off the loan, then there should be minimal service visits until that point in time. They do not base maintenance cycles upon owners who may keep a car for 10-15 years or where it faces "severe service".
The definition of severe service can include just about every type of driving we do at some point in our lives. Towing a trailer, temperature extremes (hot or cold), dusty environments, etc... Almost every car should be considered severe service unless it was a hangar queen and was plugged in to a float charger except for weekends or Friday nights out on the town.
BMW is a business, they make money from selling cars, the dealers make some more money by maintaining cars, either under (warranty) repairs where the manufacturer eats some of the cost of from non-warranty where the owner is footing the bill. They do not over-design for cars to last too far beyond that warranty period or the first owner. It is not profitable to manufacture anything that lasts forever.
It is interesting to see how the //M cars have a more stringent maintenance schedule than the non //M variants. They are still essentially the same vehicles and if you look at the common wear components it just does not make sense to declare something a lifetime fluid in a baseline car, but to do regular fluid changes in the //M variant.
Personally I own cars for a long time; The one that the X3 is replacing as my daily driver was a 2005 C350-4Matic with 180,000 miles. It had finally reached the point of dramatically increasing maintenance costs on things that would of been considered lifetime. I expect that this one too will be a +10 year ownership (I am holding out for Star Trek transporter technology). To get to that point without horrible issues I will be doing more than the bare minimum of BMW maintenance.
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Interesting opinions . . .