I had a BMW once, an X3. Beautiful (really) inline-6 engine. Nice looking car. Comfy interior. I had a lot of enthusiasm for this thing.
SO MUCH flimsy plastic where it did not belong. Nylon gears in the AWD system that repeatedly failed... and are not accessible without removing the entire transfer case and everything attached to it. Corrugated plastic tubing with proprietary (also plastic, and fragile) molded-on connectors under the hood where any other manufacturer would have used rubber hoses cut to length with a metal clamp. Seals in the engine that, well, didn't... turns out multilayer metal gaskets have advantages over a simple rubber bead where extended high temperatures are involved. Overall, an overengineered chunk of crap, just like everyone warned me it would be beforehand...
Got rid of that lemon after a year, will never again own a BMW product of any kind. How they justify charging SO MUCH for their vehicles, I will never know. It makes me sad that they even make EVs, they surely are stealing oxygen from other manufacturers that can make a car that doesn't fall to pieces immediately. What's the point of an environmentally friendly car, if the car itself needs to be replaced much more often?
BMW needs to get WAY better. The only pattern I've ever seen from them is, "It's expensive, so it's good, right?", and "Well, that's what you get for having a BMW OUT OF WARRANTY, you poor."
I replaced it with a 20-year-old Subaru, had that car for several years. Since then I've had a much more reasonable range of problems (basic maintenance, a stuck EGR valve, and a failed turbo), all of which were amenable to an afternoon with basic hand tools and NO SPECIAL DEALER SOFTWARE. Looking at you, ISTA-P.
