Hello all. Posting this preemptively to gauge interest, but will change this over to a full blown for sale ad with better photos soon. Just need to find some time to clean up the interior, and jack it up to take photos of the undercarriage.

Vehicle: 2006 E53 X5 4.8is
Colors: Black / black
Mileage: 105,600
Sale price: $10,000
Location: Covington, LA
Reason for sale: Selling my house and can no longer continue on the project since I won’t have a place to store it or work on it

I bought this back in 2021 from a guy in LA and drove it back home to Louisiana where it’s been garaged ever since. Absolutely no rust. I bought it specifically because I wanted an older E series BMW to tinker around with as a project. Well, the project grew legs and I have replaced a TON of parts. About $13k worth of parts alone. Basically, any time something was taken apart, I took the “while I’m in here” approach and replaced everything. All OEM or OE parts mostly from FCP euro, and I have all the receipts printed out and placed in a binder with the dates written on each part that was replaced.

Notable new parts within the last 6k miles:
- Valve stem seals (Elring) and nearly all external oil seals on the engine except for front and rear mains.
- All fluids and filters are fresh
- entire cooling system - water pump, radiator, expansion tank, hoses, etc
- Nearly the entire front drivetrain including new OEM front diff from BMW Germany, refurbished transfer case, new GKN CV axles, and new OEM carrier bearing
- 95% new suspension components, converted to 4 corner coils to get ride of the dreaded air suspension. Still have all original air suspension parts and all the plumbing is still inside the car.
- New brakes (original calipers though), including parking brake shoes and cables
- New rear subframe bushings and motor/transfer case mounts
- Rebuilt CV joint on rear driveshaft and new center support bearing
- New headlight lenses with EvoX-R 2.0 bi-xenon projectors
- A whole bunch of other parts not listed here (will also put the full list together and upload here soon)

Now the bad. I was sideswiped by someone without insurance in an unregistered car that wasn’t his, for which the owner also didn’t have insurance. And oh yeah he didn’t have a US citizenship or a license. Needless to say I paid for the repairs, which included new driver’s side doors from a junk yard e53 (had them painted), an entirely new left rear suspension, wheel bearing, cv axle, wheel, tire, etc and while I did that I pretty much replaced all the matching parts on the passenger side. Essentially he pit manuevered me and when my rotating wheel caught on his, it snapped the upper control arm and the wheel wasn’t sitting right. Had to have it towed from the scene. The door damage was very superficial - they still had all the proper alignment gaps, opened and closed with no issues, and the windows rolled up and down. Just the metal was scratched and wrinkled.

The second bad thing is that I cannot get ISTA to work. I have tried three different download instruction and cable configuration methods, five different computers including one that I bought from eBay with ISTA already loaded on it, and I still can’t get the cable to register properly. Because of that, I have not been able to code out the air suspension and the trifecta warning lights are on. These were not present before the air suspension removal and the code I’m getting is 005EB7, which is the same code that Crystalworks had when he removed his air suspension here: https://xoutpost.com/bmw-sav-forums/...oogle_vignette

All he had to do was code it as a 4.4i to get rid of the 4 corner air suspension option and voila. No code or trifecta. I just can’t seem to get ISTA up and running to do that, so the car has been sitting for quite some time, which I really don’t like. She deserves to be driven. If you already have a working ISTA configuration, this could be a really great car at an amazing price considering all the recent work that’s been done.

Anyway, I just tried to upload pics and couldn’t, so I’m gonna host them on another server and link them. Let me know if this link works for some of the photos I uploaded:

https://imgur.com/gallery/QbKY7R2

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2006 X5 4.8is