How often do you service your X5?

[kvc]

Originally Posted by JCL

I do services generally according to the maintenance lights, usually slightly earlier. Lights have been calling for service at 28,000 km (up from 25,000 km baseline due to our usage characteristics) but I do it at 20-24k, or 2 years, whichever comes first.

Wow - that's a long interval...and you say 'no sludge'? I suppose this is okay if you only intend to keep the vehicle until it's turned over 100K kms or so then trade it in, but if you plan on keeping it for longer (200K or more), personally I would be inclined to increase the service intervals to half that at a maximum. As has already been mentioned several times, we generally use our vehicles in a harsh driving environment, so a more frequent transfusion of essential blood would/should be of benefit, especially so given the weight of our vehicles and how hard they get 'pushed' to move that mass.

[JCL]

Originally Posted by kvc

Wow - that's a long interval...and you say 'no sludge'? I suppose this is okay if you only intend to keep the vehicle until it's turned over 100K kms or so then trade it in, but if you plan on keeping it for longer (200K or more), personally I would be inclined to increase the service intervals to half that at a maximum. As has already been mentioned several times, we generally use our vehicles in a harsh driving environment, so a more frequent transfusion of essential blood would/should be of benefit, especially so given the weight of our vehicles and how hard they get 'pushed' to move that mass.

These engines do not have problems with sludge, generally. If they are not warmed up completely, they can have problems with condensate, but not sludge.

It doesn't make sense to me that I can go 100,000 with no oil consumption, and then suddenly something changes after that and the engine wears out prematurely.

I have posted pictures previously of the internals of a BMW engine with 100,000 miles, on factory service intervals, and it looked pretty good.

I do service it more frequently than it calls for, by about 10-20%. That is a reasonable additional safety margin, IMO. Servicing it two or three times in the scheduled interval is a lot. Not many engineering calculations use additional safety factors of 2x to 3x over the design spec.