Bought my daughter a 2002 X5

[Skyline]

I just bought my 17 year old daughter a 2002 X5. This was a reward for getting very nearly a full ride to college. It is a 4.4i Sport model, in dark grey. It has sport seats (no heat unfortunately!), Sat Nav and 6 disc changer..but no DSP. Rear air shocks only. It also has the 20" wheels from a 4.6i. I shopped around for quite a while, and I think found a decent example, and the price was very right.

The good is that the car is near showroom condition. There are three small dimples that PDR will fix in the next 10 days or so. The right mirror is scraped, and the roof lip above the windscreen needs to be painted, (requiring the first foot or so of the roof painted and blended near the sunroof). Needs a new windshiled as well. All that will be done this week. That's it for cosmetics. So in about two weeks the car will be basically perfect cosmetically. Not bad for ten years old. No one who has seen it, (who can't tell a year of a BMW by exact styling cues,) can believe the age of the car.

The bad is that it's got it's share of typical X5 woes. Indicated mileage is only 85K, but according to the Carfax, that's been tampered with. Given three missing years on the Carfax, my guess is closer to 130k. It needs two of the front control arms, and sway bar links. Rest of the suspension is fine. These are repairs I can deal with easily.

It's got a pretty good amount of oil leakage, so I'll start with valve cover gaskets first, and may as well do the plugs at the same time, (given the unknown mileage.) I'll need to check the CCV gasket as well, and get a look at all those hoses from the OSV.

NAV screen has some bad pixel glitches, and a new LCD is on it's way from Hong Kong. Given how good the NAV is on my only two year newer 2004 Infiniti, I can't believe how bad this system is; but it better than nothing. It seems to have a very hard time finding the best route, and is quite cumbersome to use. The map is virtually useless, and unless I'm missing something, it does not seem to have things like schools, parks, hospitals, restaurants and gas stations programmed in. Oh well.

Well, that's it for the "easy" problems. I've got a few issues that have me scratching my head a bit, which I will post to this thread.