Question about de-optioning... (BMW related)

In reply to klodkrawler05:

I need three shoulder belts in the back. No way I'm telling one kid (or my wife) they can't go get an ice cream!

In reply to golfduke:

I honestly appreciate your warning about the lack of driving comfort.

However, if you read my history of my past Samurais not to mention the Cherokees and the K5 Blazer (with 9" of lift and 39.5" Super Swampers and no carpet, roll-up windows and crappy stereo, you'd know I'm a masochist!

ebonyandivory wrote: In reply to alfadriver: I've been watching YouTube (that's my first mistake) of videos with various cars but BMWs in particular. Maybe it's drifting, maybe it's 800hp cars doing burnouts in a parking lot. Maybe even semi-amateur rally cars. They all started out as street cars. Forget the ones with LS Swaps. The cars I'm looking at have factory-issued engines or at the least, a larger displacement engine from within the family. How are these people taking early to mid 2000's cars and stripping all but the most basic hardware and having all-too-much fun with them? Some are street legal and daily driven!

I think a lot of those guys "daily drive" to the race shop that they work at and back, and have a lot of $$$ to blow on European option delete parts you could never get here. I would love to see videos of the finer points of what does and doesn't still work on those "daily driven" cars!

As alfadriver (and I) already noted, there are some basic questions you will need to address. The E39 is not a simple car. You can remove the power lock modules, sure. What do you put in their place? Same with power windows. Sure you can ditch those, but unless you just want fixed windows, how are you going to make them go up and down? Then the seats. BMWs have gas-charged seatbelt pretensioners integrated into the seat buckle, which are part of the SRS system and fixed to the seat with a unique mount. If you want to put aftermarket seats in, great, but what do you do about the seatbelt? If you run harnesses, there goes your ability to have anyone in the back seat. Deleting the AC is simple, but are you going to pull the dashboard from the car to truly remove every last component of the system? Heck, do you know how much wiring an E39 has? Do you have a month to strip the entire interior, including the dashboard and just de-pin connectors for days at a time?

There's a certain irony to all this...and that is that there's a crapload of work involved in stripping all of this stuff, when the ultimate goal is to have a car that will not break and create a bunch of extra work

I'm not trying to rain on your parade but I owned an E39 myself and I constantly worked on my dad's and I would really, really suggest going for an E34 or older because your goals will be a hundred times easier. The E36 was BMW's last car that wasn't overly CANBUS-heavy so those examples don't really apply to the E39.

I always wanted to take a BMW I6 and add this.

I completely get what the OP is trying to get to with respect to what he wants in a car. Simple easy to fix without all the doodads that modern cars have.

It's also worth noting that a lot of the doodads that fail on E39s are core to the drivetrain. DISA valve, CCV system, MDK (throttle body), VANOS seals, cooling system, heck I had to replace the engine wiring harness on my E39 because the PO let the motor mounts get really bad and it flexed the harness to the point where a bunch of connections were intermittent!

And then wait until you see the cost of parts when you have to do a front and rear suspension refresh all at once...

I love my E28 so much more.

In reply to pointofdeparture:

Thank you for you're very sensible replies and certainly the other guys here that were equally helpful.

I asked a question and even though I don't like the answer, I cannot and would not begin to argue the answer(s).

I am rethinking my plan as suggested: either start with a simpler car or use the later car as delivered and repair (or don't) the things that fail of their own volition.

This place is such a good balance of enabling and sensibility.

Now please keep posting any suggestions you can think of that can help me fulfill my goal even though I must modify that goal quite a bit.

If you must have a BMW, I think an E34 with the M30 engine (that would be a 535i) is exactly what you want. The final iteration of BMW's longest-lived straight-six (M30) in a car that saw BMW scratching the surface of the 90's. My M30-powered E28 has 340k on it and is still going strong with minimal maintenance, they are MUCH simpler than the subsequent M50-series engines. The E34 is new enough to feel pretty "modern" but old enough to be a few orders of magnitude less complex than the E39 (no CANBUS, steering wheel and dash airbags only, much less power-stuff-for-the-sake-of-having-power-stuff options). Yeah you'll have power windows, locks and probably a sunroof but you might as well just use that stuff until it breaks. The only real problem with them is that the interior plastics fall apart like E36s but that's an easy problem to get over.

In reply to pointofdeparture:

Any word on 3 shoulder belts in the back?

This guys build is on Bimmerforums. This is after a 6.5 hour drive to the track. He's taken 1st at least twice in SpecE36

[URL=http://s265.photobucket.com/user/derekrichardson/media/fenders/IMG_4405.jpg.html][/URL]

This thread had me thinking about Subaru offering a TR (Tuner ready) WRX a bunch of years back. It was basically a stripped down WRX- no wing or wrx moulding, manual seats and windows (I think), radio but no cd player... nothing else.

I bet something like that would sell in other lines. I'm curious how it did with Subaru. Probably not well considering I don't think it's offered anymore.

In reply to golfduke:

Isn't it funny how many "options" became standard offerings? And now buyers are conditioned they need (deserve) power everything.

Where else in life is it this complicated to simplify?

The easiest thing to do might be to try and convince yourself it's the wife's car and you'd never buy something with all these doodads in it.

Wall-e wrote: The easiest thing to do might be to try and convince yourself it's the wife's car and you'd never buy something with all these doodads in it.

Including the manual transmission!