To buy or not to buy?

[TriX5]

Unless you tackle some of the fixes yourself I would recommend against it. If you can find a car that has a lot of the common trans/engine fixes done you are in good shape. If they are coming up or you cannot verify the repairs then you might be looking at spending the price of the car in maintenance in the 80k - 120k miles interval. Cars that get pushed in to the trade seem to often have problems, that is why they get dumped.

I have owned my 03 since 45k miles and I just did the trans and valley pan at 95k myself (took quite a few weeks since so many competing items out there for spending time...). Previously I swapped the waterpump, three CV boots and a CV joint. I am planning to do the chainguides and vanos when it gets colder again in the fall. All of these fixes would add up to 5 or 6000 at an indy and over 10 at the dealer.....in essence a pre-facelift X5 with 100k on the clock is a "total-loss" as the repairs equal or exceed the value of the car :-0)

I know that is an extreme view but a lot of the Outposters have gone through all/some of these fixes at some point. The AT is less frequent and at varying mileage but they do fail. My wife is slowly starting to argue to let the '03 go, I just might do that but not quite yet.