My New To Me 2003 X5 4.4-With ATX Issues

[upallnight]

Originally Posted by tempest411

Hello,

After researching these for the last five months I happened across this one that appealed to me. It's got the tan interior, NO navigation, and...it's not black. The engine is also perfectly quiet from cold through warmed up which hopefully tells me the guides have some life left in them (it has 114k miles). It looks unmolested mechanically, electrically, and had NO warning lights illuminated on the dash. It does have a transmission issue. According to the seller the transmission goes into limp/failsafe when it warms up. According to paperwork given to me a shop that looked at it says it needs a new valve body, as more than likely a solenoid was ceasing to operate at warm temperatures. I've only driven it a few hundred feet and I notice it goes into forward and reverse gears just fine, but there is a delay in actual forward motion when you step on the gas, just as if it were low on fluid. One anecdote I read said this is a pressure regulator issue, the same one that can cause the 'A' drum to eventually fail. Either way that's a valve body issue. What I want to do now is to try and eliminate any issue within the transmission that would require swapping the who transmission out. One bad scenario would be where I replaced the valve body at $1000.00, then found out the issue required transmission replacement at $2500.00+. Does anyone have any suggestions how to best go about diagnosing thithis issue? The seller had a scanner which he connected to show me any codes which might be stored, and only two TX related codes came up. I forgot to write them down, but they were both related to 'speed'. Turbine speed, and something else...I'd replace both speed sensors and the harness while I was in there if that's the direction I go.

Thank you for reading my rambling introduction to X5 ownership!

Rick

Did he show you the readiness cycle for the engine? If the readiness was incomplete that means the computer was cleared of any trouble code recently. The codes that did showed up could be hard codes.

Many new owners has been burned by buying an X at a low price only to be shocked when it came to fixing a simple issue.

My advice since you are afraid of a big repair cost, is to take a walk from this X. Plenty of X out there and the price is coming down every day. The ZF tranny cars are known for problems so unless you want that BMW V8, I would look for a M54 engine X and if you know how to drive a stick look for the manual tranny X.