You will enjoy the bimmer much more than the VW piss-ant. I know I have so far!

I was not impressed by VW's build quality. Our old Passat had more rattles, squeaks and creaks from the interior than I could count. I gave up trying to fix them years ago. It didn't help that our turbo blew at 56k miles to the tune of $2k either.

Even still, I was actually considering buying one of the new Passat wagons, until I test drove it back to back with an X3.;)

I test drove the new passat as well. Actually it wasnt so much of a test drive as much as me demanding a free loaner car after my passat stopped starting for the 4th time in 2 months. Its alright, def have to go with the larger engine. But youre right, the build quality just isnt there.

Congrats! X3's rock! I'm on my second and have gotten two others to buy them as well. I had the 2.5 in my first and you're right, it does really well - better than I thought it would.:thumbup:

Congrats and :xoutpost:

Hey Phil,

It's good to see a familiar name/face from the E46 fold at bimmerfest.com... Welcome to the group of X3 owners. We've had our X3 for over 2 years and have been happy with it. We're starting to think about it's replacement (lease up next year) and a Euro Delivery on a '07 X3 is a good possibility!

Nice find... the X3's are holding very good resale (you really can't find one from a dealer for less than $27-28k unless it has ALOT of miles and is a really bad combo) and it looks like you found a nicely equipped example.

Is it just me, or does the X3 seem to have particularly good residual value? I think it's better than the X5! Dealers are charging CPO prices on the X3 that are almost equivalent if not higher than the price of a NEW X3........and a quick look at Blue book shows that my 2+ yr, 30k mile X3 holding over 86% of what we paid for it!! :wow:

BMW 3-series have very strong resale. BMW SAV's have very strong resale. I guess the X3 got a double order of "good resale value"!

Thanks. We've really been enjoying our X3 so far, and have been finding reasons to drive it all over the place. It's also now totaly shined up from top to bottom, tucked safely in our garage.:)

I'm finding it kind of strange how difficult it is to find answers to rather simple questions by searching. There are so many E46 owners on the boards that a simple search on any major site will give you ten different versions of the same answer. For the X3, it seems I need to search all the boards to hopefully come up with one good answer.

try using advanced search you can pick which forum to search in :thumbup:

jb