New member intro and some nice E53 pics

[MdV]

Over the past few months I've been reading a lot of this forum to do my share of research on E53's . I am a BMW enthousiast for quite a few years now and have mainly been driving Z-series, but that era has ended

When our daugther was born last year I sold the Z4 3.0 and Z3 Coupe and started looking for something bigger for our familiy trips. My wife got herself gorgeous E61 and I had my mind set on a E53. For tax reasons these cars can be bought fairly cheap here in The Netherlands since greener cars a heavily subsidized by the government. With only little demand for E53's and quite a few for sale, I had time to find a decent one. Since most of them are black and silver and I wanted it to be 'a little different' it had to be either a light blue Sport of green grey.

When I found this picture of one the members here (who? ) that seemed to be the set up I liked best


Last April I did buy one, a '02 X5 3.0 Sport in Grun Grau metallic. To sum it up: love the car! we only use it for approx 6k miles per year but it is a great ride for sure.



Of course it has had its share of issues since I got it, but thanks to the forum none of them were a big surprise These were probably the reason the previous owner sold the car . Had some issues with the rear air suspension (tiny leak in of one of the tubes, fixed and no replacement needed) and a drained battery, more than once. Replaced the FSR and since that did not appear to be the cause of the drained battery, did further research and had the phone charger disabled. Issues have now been solved.

Of course I had done my share of mods already main ones are the original BMW style 168 20" , privacy shades and reprogramming of the keys (doors auto-lock etc)





As you can see the rear panel is somewhat damaged, I need to get that fixed. maybe I will adjust the ride hight in the near future, maybe I won't.