Originally Posted by davintosh

I've been reading up on this issue a lot lately, but this is the first time I've seen this thread. Read through the whole thing, and... Wow. The engine fire scares the crap out of me, because my wife is the primary driver of the X5.

We only bought the X5 last September, and I've noticed the sludge inside the valve cover and on the dipstick, and an oil usage rate that's higher than I would expect (the M30 engine in my e32 with 200,000 miles on it doesn't use any oil between changes). I recently went through the maintenance records that the previous owner provided, and what I read scared me about as much as the report of the engine fire. The records I have go back to about 70,000 miles; it now has about 150k on it, and show that the oil separator has been replaced three times, most recent time was about a year ago. In addition to the OS, the valve cover & gasket have been replaced twice, and the intake manifold once (with the heated unit.)

From what I've gleaned from my reading, BMW still hasn't come up with a real resolution to this problem; that's pretty disappointing.

When I changed the oil yesterday, I took some extra time and did the vacuum trick to try & suction some of the sludge out of the OS pipes. Got a little bit of sludge out of it, but not much. There seemed to be a lot of moisture in there though; not sure what to think of that (coolant level hasn't changed since September.) Does anybody know of any new information on this issue?