Changing Transmission Fluid - 2004 X3
 

I recently purchased a pre-owned 2004 X3 with 60K miles on it. Conventional wisdom tells me to change the tranny and differential/transfer case fluids--normally at 30K mile intervals. The BMW tech told me during the Inspection II just completed that I don't need to change these until 100,000 miles. WHAT!!!!????:wow:

Synthetic or not these fluids need to be changed, correct? I want to drive this vehicle for several years and this doesn't make any sense. Any advice? Is it imperative I use the synthetic fluids BMW recommends or will conventional do (if I change every 30K miles)?:dunno:

No, they don't need to be changed. You are certainly free to do so, and many owners decide they want to do more frequent changes, but 100,000 miles is the design point for most of the driveline fluid changes.

Recommend you use BMW fluid. Transmission models vary, and typically there is a tag on the transmission telling you what fluid to use in your specific transmission.

There are lots of threads on here (on X5World in the E53 section more so than in the X3 forum) so search and see what you find.

It's because they want you to buy a new car. That's the only reason anyone in their right mind would wait 15,000 miles to change engine oil as well. That is way too long. I have a BMW mechanic who no longer works for the dealer and says to change it every 5,000. It may not be free, but if you plan to keep the car for a long time then maintain it. Worth paying a few bucks in my opinion.

There are lots of opinions on this on the board, for each side. Probably not a good idea to tell some of us that we are not in our right minds, although you are certainly entitled to your opinion. I am still waiting to see a documented engine failure resulting from oil change intervals that follow BMW recommendations. I have previously posted pictures of a 100,000 mile engine that did follow those recommendations. We aren't driving our grandfather's Oldsmobile here, as sump capacity is double, we are using much better oils, and the engines design and manufacturing is improved.

Anyway, welcome to the board! :thumbup:

:iagree:

Haha ok point taken. I will change my fluids more often. How bout that.

Yes, there is a happy middle ground in this debate.

The downsides of changing oil too frequently:
- additives in oil may only just be reaching full effectiveness
- "dry" startup after oil change might be harmless but it can't be beneficial

On the other hand, many people think "normal usage" is daily short commutes and a Sunday drive to church, with no highway trips.
Far from being suitable for 15K intervals, this is where a "severe service" schedule should be followed.

Oil might well be good for 15K of fast highway use, but I'm not convinced that oil filter technology has progressed to keep pace, so this is now the weak link.
At least in the X3 it is easy to do a mid-term filter-only change if you feel so inclined.

The reason for the annual or 24 month oil change is to deal with low mileage usage. Short trips, particularly in very cold ambients, are brutal on a vehicle. When I lived in -40, I religiously followed manufacturer's severe service recommendations, particularly for engine oil.

With a blend of highway and urban driving, I am now doing 12,000 miles in 15 months, so that is when I change it.

With respect to automatic transmission fluid, the original question, I wouldn't touch it, but that is just me. I haven't seen or read of problems with burnt fluid, more so failures of sensors and actuators, and those aren't going to be fixed by early fluid changes. With diffs, I wouldn't change them based on normal usage, but would do so if I was wading across streams (just as an example).

All that said, people are certainly free to change their fluids more frequently if it makes one feel better. After hundreds of threads on the subject, that is pretty much the bottom line. Do what feels good.

Wow! thanks for the feedback. This is certainly a hot topic for many. I'm going to change the tranny & diff fluids. I already change oil every 5K miles & have all my life. I've never had a vehicle fail for these reasons and the cost to replace a tranny or x drive is not something I want to do. Seems like money well spent given the color of the fluids & viscoscity comparisons before & after. I just wanted to make sure the Munchen Boys didn't come up with some Holy Grail/fountain of car youth formula that can actually last 100K. Sounds like the same group of engineers that came up with the 100K tune up & spark plug recommendation...rrriigghhtt...
I like my BMW, but momma didn't raise no fool.
Cheers!

Hahahaha. This certainly is a hot topic. A hot topic on any car forum. Let's consider that tractor trailer trucks don't have regular oil changes shall we? They simply get an oil analysis every so often and those engines last hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles. To say that the guys at the oil change shops know more than the engineers who designed the engine is a stretch. Both are trying to make money off you of course.

Myself, I change according to the manufacturer recommendations or when I notice a problem. I had Amsoil transmission fluid in my last car and it lasted 90,000 miles. And I'm going to use Amsoil synthetic fluid in the X3 when the warranty runs out. It has a one year/25,000 mile life span, but only when used with their Ea series filters which are not available for the X3. : (

To each his own, but don't get offended by other's opinions. : )

Cheers.

Well, on highway truck engines all start off with regular oil change intervals, often 12,500 or 15,000 or more miles (my experience is with the yellow ones from Peoria, but other brands are similar). Any variation from those intervals should be done based on a rigorous Scheduled Oil Analysis (SOS) program, or the equivalent program from another manufacturer. That program looks at engine condition, fluid condition, and operating conditions. Any extension of oil change intervals has to be based on that program, it isn't just a case of occasionally getting an SOS sample. That is how we get them to the million mile club. We can see 30,000+ mile change intervals, sure, but the ones who get the best performance out of their heavy duty engines, over the full life cycle, most definitely have a regular oil change; those oil changes just aren't necessarily at the manufacturer's recommended mileage, rather they are condition-based.

As an aside, welcome to the site! :thumbup: (should we call you Jake?)

I just want to say thanks to JCL for his always knowledgeable and professional posts. He is someone you definitely want to listen to. :thumbup:

I too want to keep our '05 X3 for a long time. At 57,### miles, I got the front & rear diffs, transfer case and the tranny (auto) fluids changed.

I went to an indy to change all but the tranny. The diffs looked fine but the fluid for the x-fer case was looking bad. I used Redline for the diffs and BMW OE for the transfer case. I got the OE fluid from Bavauto.com- it was like $38.

I convinced my local dealership to do the tranny fluid&fliter. They asked me if I sure like 3 times. I said yes and paid like $350 for the service.

I was told that the trannies for the X3 are pretty good unlike the E46s. However, it comes down to peace of mind vs. the cost.

Good luck.

change my tranny fluid every 12k miles in my x3. Talking to a tech at BMW dealer and he does the same to his father in laws car.

That is a lot of additional maintenance. Do you change all fluid compartments and wear items at eight times the manufacturer's recommendations? 2000 miles on engine oil and filter, or every 7 weeks, whichever comes first? 8000 miles for spark plugs?

Yes, JCL is one of my favorites too . . . always worth reading.

I too am planning oil changes for my "new" german tractor ('01 3.0i, 5 spd MT) with 78k.

Understanding the many pros and cons to various interval preferences under various conditions, I'm having a little trouble with the following:

1. How is it that the dark 5w30 at 6000 miles is lubricating ever bit as well as the highly translucent stuff I put in 6 months ago?

2. As the transmission gears, chains, etc. lose metal (and they do erode metal), where do those metal shavings, molecules, etc. go? My E53 has an oil filter for ONLY the engine oil, and I haven't yet located any appropriately sized drain plugs with magnetic tips to help corral these life robbing varmints.

3. Higher loads equal greater wear. Do you try to get your MXX to produce rated hp often? Are you pulling close to the 6,000 lbs limit routinely? The bits of metal fragment roaming around our transmissions, transfer cases, and differentials suspended in "lifetime oil" are taking their toll until they're drained out.

After reading the threads, owner's manual, bentley manual, and research on other sites I'll change out with the following soon with new crush washers everywhere. Would appreciate any feedback as to anyone's previous experiences with these oils in application.

Engine - Lubro-Moly 5w30, considering 5w40 ref. florida temps and frequent towing to capacity.

MT - BMW MTF-LT-3

TC - Lubro-Moly ATF III

Differentials - Lubro-Moly 75w90, considering 75w140 ref. florida temps and frequent towing to capacity.

- M54 Lover

I am going to have to get my tribology textbooks out one day soon. All this lubrication discussion. True lubrication engineers can feel free to correct me on the details below.

Well, it may be counter-intuitive, but the colour of the oil has no bearing on the lubrication quality of the oil. Clear or translucent oil can be broken down and damaged, and dirty oil can be fine. If you change the oil in your diesel engine, it will be black in a couple of minutes. The material providing the colour is small enough not to impact the lubrication quality, until the point at which the viscosity starts to change. Particles large enough to matter for wear impact are taken out by the filter. The oil has several jobs, including lubrication, cooling, etc, but one of the most important is to keep contaminants in suspension. It is probably a bad analogy, but if you dissolve a tsp of salt in a glass of water, the salty water doesn't feel gritty. Same principle. Incidentally, this also relates to why oil sampling doesn't tell you much about the oil, but instead about the compartment it came from. Metallic elements in the oil measured through typical analysis are not damaging the oil, they are simply providing history on what types of metals wore in the engine. The exception to that is TBN/TAN reporting, which does tell you about the depletion of additives and thus when to change your oil, and silicates, which tell you about either dirt or assembly lubes.

If they were losing as much metal as you suggest, the transmission would be very noisy very quickly. The small amount of metal that wears is held in suspension by the oil. If the transmission had rough edges and poor machining from the start, then a magnetic plug would help stop those pieces circulating. There aren't a lot of pieces being broken off once the gears are run in. A magnetic plug isn't a bad idea at all, but the engineers who designed the vehicle couldn't justify the pennies it would have cost, essentially because the benefit is less than that tiny cost.

You are comparing sealed compartments like transmissions and diffs with the engine, and they are each very different. The engine has a built in source of contamination, namely the combustion process. It generally has a filter because it needs one (not all engines do, it depends on the design). A design engineer can pressure lube a transmission and then add a filter to the circuit, but that isn't worth doing in an automotive application because the gears will last long enough without that level of sophistication and cost.

Lots of things result in greater wear, but the issue is are you crossing over beyond the safety factor that the engineer designed the system for? It isn't a linear relationship. Higher loads don't directly cause much difference in wear because the loads are well within the design limits for the lubrication, and are usually applied for a portion of the operating cycle of the equipment. Fatigue wear isn't a factor until you get to much higher power outputs, usually. Heat is a big factor, and towing is a good example of loading up a system and creating more heat. If that heat is managed by a well-maintained cooling system, towing in and of itself won't destroy fluids.

It is all an interesting discussion. Many owners wrestle with how often to change fluids, and which oil to use. My opinion, and it is only my opinion, is that the manufacturer's recommendations are pretty reasonable, and if someone wants to change them more frequently then it is a cheap way to feel good about maintenance. More frequently can mean simply doing them 20% more often. Doubling the frequency of planned changes is quite a step, and doing them more often that that seems extreme to me. We have the benefit of very high quality oils these days, and the same for filters. Any of the name brands that meet the manufacturer's spec will do fine. Your vehicle won't know the difference between different oils that meet the same spec. Not following the manufacturer's specs is like playing roulette, but sometimes people win at roulette.

As to your planned fluid changes, absolutely use new crush washers. I don't see why you wouldn't go to a 5-40 for Florida temperatures and towing. I wouldn't use LM, but that is just me. I would use Castrol or Mobil 1. For the diff, I would follow BMW recommendations on viscosity.

At this point I'm changing the oil in my 2004 X3 2.5 every 7,500-8,000 miles. The used oil analysis(UOA) results show that the additive package(TBN) is almost totally depleted by 8,000 miles:

http://www.carspace.com/roadburner/A...um/X3UOA4.JPG/

Note that I was using Mobil 1 0W-40- a BMW LL-01 oil. At my last oil change I switched to Mobil 1 5W-40 to see if its robust additive package will hold up better.

I'm planning on changing the ATF in the wife's x3 this weekend. 2006 X3 3.0L. I picked up the Castrol Import Multi-Vehicle fluid. It meets all the BMW trans specs:BMW — LA2634, LT71141,Texaco ETL-7045-E, ETL-8027B, Shell M1375.4.

http://www.castrol.com/liveassets/bp...s_ImportMV.pdf

update. I changed the X3 fluid with Castrol Dexron VI instead of the multiimport. Its been almost 2000miles, shifts are smooth, and no issues. Original fluid was dark after 45k miles.

Did you do it yourself? Can you share the procedure?
Trans filter, trans fluid, and how do you measure proper level as I dont think my 05 model has a trans dipstick to measure level .
Is there drain and fill holes? and basically refill till it starts oozing out? I remember the e34's were like that.

It was a pretty easy DIY. There is no dipstick, but you are correct on the" fill until it comes out of the fill hole. " It is probably the same as it was on your e34.
1. lift vehicle
2. drain atf
3. remove pan &replace filter.
4. reassemble
5. fill with dexron VI fluid. it took @ 4qts.