2009 BMW M3: The case for nav...and dipsticks

That's my main gripe about modern BMW, followed closely by the absence of a LSD option on non-M cars and the standard RFTs fitted to non-M cars.
My friend's E30 M3 with just 50K on the clock is looking better all the time- especially when I read something like this:
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/10q1/10_cars_to_drive_before_you_die-feature/readers_27_choice_and_more_page_2

I like that half the BMWs in this picture are white. I guess that's Vegas for ya...

I am running for president of the International Congress of Dipstick Lovers in the fall, can I assume I have your vote?

Not that the owner's manual would come in handy here, but... it *does* say several things, namely that you shouldn't add oil unless the car tells you, that when it tells you it will instruct you on how much to add.

Oh, and clean that engine bay!

3200 for navi and a few toys. Yeah, pass. Comfort Access is nice. That's really all I'd want. I have a blackberry, I have goog411 and google maps.

If everything is working properly (and trust me, I own a BMW, so I know that's a big, big "If"), then you shouldn't have to add four quarts of oil when the computer isn't even telling you that you need to add any...

I don't know how big the sump is on that car (I assume big, since the six cylinders hold ~7 liters of oil), but 4 quarts is (obviously) a LOT of oil to be low. Damn.

defending nav is easy when you drive free cars. For most people its just a way to make your interior look fancier because you are rarely going to use it. I have a portable and use a few times a year. 99% of the time that you drive (unless you are a salesman) you dont need directions. Now that many cars are coming with screens without nav it makes nav even more pointless. VW is now featuring an LCD screen showing audio system info and other stuff and that is probably the wave of the future. People care more about the screen than the nav system.

looking at that display I'm confused as to why IL decides to criticize lower priced vehicles for radio or instrument cluster displays that supposedly look like leftovers from 80s VCRs. Is that red display considered state of the art? Got to love those double standards.

I like having nav in my cars. Its a status symbol. It says, "I didn't just edge my way into a car I can barely afford. I got every friggin option there is dammit!!"

Judging by this photo white BMWs seem to be all the rage in Cali. What's up with that?

ranting...I believe you are ranting because I've heard it never ranes in California...

I'd rather have a hand held Garmin. At least you can take it with you and not spend money on 'status' items that are not necessary esp in a sporting car like an M3. In car navs actually decrease resales values as well.

@ hurls65 - He only added one quart of oil, he just added it in increments (so he poured from the same bottle a total of 4 times).

hurls65, Mike added a total of 1 quart..........he did 1/2, 1/4 and then 1/4 quart.

Why don't you guys just get a few quarts of the proper oil, and put them in the trunk? Obviously, you're going to need it, and the car is so picky, it requires special juice..

Re the nav, the cost to repair one out of warranty is RIDICULOUSLY HIGH. And just keeping them updated is a pain. Why pay in the THOUSANDS when you can walk into a local Costco and for a buck fifty leave with a nice one?

Did the car say "gulp gulp gulp!"?

No offense to the dipstick crowd, of which I am one, but I have had multiple cars now with ridiculous dipsticks. They either were impossible to read, required multiple wipes or a multi-step method to get a good read, or were inconsistent in their readings.

I like the electronic version (with maybe an el-cheap dipstick in the engine bay?), and I'm guessing that the car needed more time or a different situation to accurately assess the volume of the sump. It's not like YOU didn't know that you had added 1/2 quart.

How many quarts of oil has this thing consumed so far since its been in the LT fleet?

No matter how hard I try, I just can't warm up to those rims...they're like a big birth mark on an otherwise flawless supermodel. Awkward dishing, too many spokes, too small for the car. the color's not bad, though.

And as far as the oil meter goes: my e90 330 has the electronic meter and it, too, takes forever to compute changes. 90 miles seems a little obscene, however. regardless, i like being able to check that meter randomly on-the-fly. very convenient.

The dipstick is always correct, what changes is the amount of oil in the pan.

When the engine is running a lot of the oil is in the engine and thus you cannot measure oil level.

When it has just been shut off it takes time for all the oil to run back to the pan and thus the level will keep changing.

Oil expands with temp so a cold engine will appear to have less oil then a hot one.

A well engineered system should be able to take all this into account and be useful. However do to all the varibles and the conditions it works in I can see it being prone to failure or incorrect readings. So much simplier to just check it with a dipstick and a rag.

Shear stupidity to remove the dipstick completely.

Mike Magrath and 1487, GM still allows me to 'navigate on the fly' in my CTS-V.

Oops....perhaps I should not have let that cat out of the bag. LOL

@majin_ssj_eric - I totally agree. The last two cars I've owned had EVERY available option.

I got the nav option in my Flex because I wanted the reverse camera that came with it. In a car the size of the Flex, you really want that! With that said, I am finding the nav very useful and well worth the money. In addition to the awesome things that Sync and Sirius Travel Link provide, the nav system has helped me discover more efficient new routes to work and my kid's school. Not that I wouldn't be able to do that with a portable unit, but I would never have thought to run a portable unit on small local trips like that. Since it's right there on the screen, I can just glance down and get a survey of the local roads at a glance.

Keep in mind that BMW is not known for the most user-friendly interfaces i.e. IDRIVE. Having said that is it really that big of a surprise that the electronic oil level indicator in this vehicle was “erratic”?

Another point to the nav system debate; on many if not most vehicles the nav system is required to get the top shelf audio system. If you are a driver who truly cares about how the music sounds and you want the additional features then the nav system is money well spent.

An auto sound system can be tweaked by someone who knows what they are doing for much less than 2k, and it will sound MUCH better in the process, for someone who really cares how their music sounds, that is. :)

"Mike Magrath and 1487, GM still allows me to 'navigate on the fly' in my CTS-V."

prior to this post I'd never heard you couldnt use GM nav systems while moving. Maybe its a 2010 MY addition. Or perhaps it doesnt apply to other vehicles.

The nav system in my B7 press loaner was fun to play with, but I find that I can easily do without a nav system in my personal cars. It's doubly annoying when navigation is bundled with one or more options that I actually would like to have.

@ ptcdawg

I know an in car audio system can be modified but at what expense and risk of aesthetic change to the vehicle? Take the current Lexus LS460 for example. The 19 speaker Mark Levinson audio system (which gets consistent top marks for audio quality from several publications) is only available with the nav system. If I’m the owner of this $70K vehicle I wouldn’t be willing to risk aftermarket mods when I can spend $2K on a proven world class sound system with a factory warrantee no less.

That’s my opinion . . . your thoughts?

Wow, it costs $2,900.00 for a slushbox? Not worth it, especially when it will likely cost around 10K to rebuild or replace it in a few years, should it fail. It seems that modern automatics have a higher incidence of this than they used to.

That electronic sensor seems quite problematic to me, where it's just as likely to lead to overfilling of the crankcase. Although electronic oil level monitoring can be convenient (assuming it could be made reliable one day), I'd never willingly substitute that for a dipstick. Why not have both?

I have the Nav on my 2008 M3 Coupe. Would not be without it. Use it almost every time I get in the car unless I am running to the grocery store. Of course, I live in the SF Bay Area which is 50 miles of urban area on the Peninsula. It may be different where it is more sparsely populated.

Even to a restaurant that I have been to before but it was 2 months ago. Otherwise, I would never find it because it is 3 towns away and Ive only been there once or twice before.

But the handiest feature is using the Nav without using the Nav. With no programming it will just show you a street map with you in the center. This is extremely handy, even for areas you are fairly but not intimately familiar with. The 2008 version, at least, has 2 screens. A large and a small and the small one can be set to always show the street map. Scale is settable with a twist of the knob. It is hard to use my minivan without nav because of this feature. Very handy.

The bigger question is why can I not log on with Firefox on OSX. It takes my email and password but does not complete the process. It has been this way for several revisions of firefox. However, Safari will let me log right on. Are all the programmers on IL microsoft only or what ???

Oh, I forgot to mention the three things that gripe me the most about the M3. NO DIPSTICK which is ridiculous so I agree with McGrath and the lack of a water temp gauge. Having blown a radiator on my old 540, water temp responds faster than oil temp. So why not both or on such a tech marvel at least a selection between them. The third is the lack of roll down windows in the rear on the coupe. These are all minor except for the lack of a temp gauge.

The plastics used in the radiators and other components of the cooling system on BMWs have a characteristic of breaking down around 60,000 miles depending on the number of startups. As this thing ages, I would be scared to take it on a long trip with that kind of mileage on it. They may have changed the formulation but it all looks to be the same stuff. If you dont believe me just google for BMW radiator failures. I had one of them but got lucky as to where it happened and turned around after a shade tree fix and limped the 100 miles back to home.

And if I could not navigate on the fly, I would seriously look for another brand. That is important. My wife does the reprogramming when in motion and a series of places need to be visited. This is the NANNY state taking over believing that we all have IQs of less than 20.

If there is one thing that will stop me from getting a BMW is the amount of oil it burns.

I have 3 slow oil leaks on my truck and it doesn't come close to the oil demands of the M3.

"Wow, it costs $2,900.00 for a slushbox? Not worth it, especially when it will likely cost around 10K to rebuild or replace it in a few years, should it fail."

I don't think it's worth it either, but it is a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual that can crack off ridiculously fast shifts, which usually comes with a steep price tag.

"If there is one thing that will stop me from getting a BMW is the amount of oil it burns."

BMWs don't burn a lot of oil... they have very long oil service intervals. Any car would require a mid-cycle oil addition when you go 15,000 miles between changes. If you elected to change your oil even every 7500 miles you would never have to add oil to a BMW, just like any other modern car.

I understand where you're coming from bimmerjay, however, some of Edmunds LT BMW's are consuming a quart of oil every 1,500 to 2,000 miles, making the long oil service intervals irrelevant.

@stingray454,

1500-2000 miles is crazy... that means the '09 M3 would have had a good 8-9 quarts added and the 750i 12-14 quarts so far in their long-term tests. A non-M should need oil every 9-12k miles, on the 7 that means it should have had at least 2 additions by now as the last post was at 28,000 miles, and the M3 maybe 2 or 3 (figuring 7-9K miles for additions). The 750i should have had 1-2 oil services and the M should have had at least 2 including the 1200 mile break-in. That is consistent with the posts I've seen on here. The 2002 M3 may have had another one or two additions but they also put a lot of miles on that car, I'd have to go back and look.

My 2006 Honda Civic SI burns 1 quart of oil every 4k miles like clockwork. Doesn't matter much which brand. It's no big deal. I do 10k intervals right now, with 84k miles on the clock.

Retiredtwice - BMW had (Has?) a habit of installing radiators with plastic necks and end-tanks, and water pumps with plastic impellers....this started in the 90s and carried over until at least 2003 if no later. I believe they have either moved back to metal, or made it on a stronger more durable plastic. I haven't seen or heard the same level of failures in the e60 (2004+ 5-series) or similar e39s. Yet. There's still time :)

By the way, the failure had nothing to do with the number of start-ups. It was simply a function of plastic + the acidity of coolant over time + heat/pressure of the different powertrains. Changing the coolant every year or so was and is a good way to prolong the life of the stock radiator.

Makes me appreciate the dipstick on my RS 4 and the water/coolant temp gauge and the oil temp gauge on the dash...oh, and while I've only owned the car for about 3000 miles, I haven't seen any oil consumption!