Originally Posted by Thecastle

Agreed. But as a guy who just got done spending 4K fixing his 2008 X5 4.8i and numerous weekends under his car on Jack stands.... I question if buying a used BMW is ever a good fincial choice compared to leasing a new one. I suspect my "cheap" X5 will cost me just as much in maintence and repairs as the lease payments for 1 year of owning a new X5. Heck I'd say if you can't diy, you'll spend so much money keeping these cars running it's likely cheaper to lease a new one every 3 years. I think the trick for saving money on a BMW is to buy a used 3 year old with less than 40k miles and keep it until it's 6 and 80k and dump it.

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Did the customer car package make the n63 reliable? As in they don't blow their oil seals, and stop eating batteries. No. I know several people who have had 3-4 sets of injectors replaced and the customer care package didn't work. If you know you've mastered the many weakness of this engine then buy one. Another thing to keep in mind, there aren't after market fixes for a lot of the engines design flaws. You will fix the same things multiple times, and frustratingly he parts are cheap but the labor to fix problems is high.

At least the diesels you can remove bmws terrible emissions system and make the engines reasonably reliable. But I wouldn't buy one as a reliable alternative to the v8. It's a different set of equally expensive problems unless you mod,

Personally if you want reliability stay away from BMW v8 engines. the n63tu still has problems too. In my opinion the n62 is probably the least problematic recent BMW v8 and there are some after market fixes for some major problems. But damn, who puts a shitty gasket behind an alternator.

Stick with the 6 it's more reliable, it jus has cooling system failures. Consider a cooling system refresh every 50k miles as maintence and you'll be good.