adventures with my 08 X5 3.0si

[mouncer]

Originally Posted by ard

First, nice to see more DIYing.

On the Geico claim- I wonder if this was a matter of the initial claim coming in at 10k ish, they approve based on "its under 75% of value" (or whatever metric they use) but then during repairs more work was uncovered.... they had already started.

If so, it is a good example of WHY they use the 75% metric- to allow for the cost overruns

Yes that was exactly it with the Geico claim. When the deer hit occured, I only had 53K miles on the car, and it was in November of 2014. The KKB book value of the car was a little over $20 at that time since mine has just about every option available except for navigation and back up camera. The initial repair estimate was around $10,400 if I remember correctly, but as they got into the repair it kept going up and up, eventually coming in a little over $14K. The repair shop said they spent about a week just steam cleaning all of the deer guts out of the engine bay, said they had never seen one this bad. It's funny because I hit the damn thing doing about 75 MPH and when I hit it I only felt a shudder on the steering well, have to give it to BMW on the crash test rating for this car. Had I been in a smaller car I am sure it would have been totalled and I probably would have been injured or even killed. Anyway, overall the car has been good to me except for recently when things have been going wrong. I will follow the advice and get the BMWhat app. I have a very basic OBD II scanner from autozone but it only pulls generic codes and apparently is not able to clear any codes at all on this vehicle.