Bingo.

The water pump was not original, as I noted when I did the guides on this X5 a while back. It's from 2011. Based on the Carfax, the car had around 104,000 miles in 2011, so this water pump has essentially lived through a whole lifespan since it failed at 217,000 miles. I probably should have thought about that when doing the chain guide job, but the water pump seemed perfectly fine to me so I put it back on. Every other car I've done guides on I've reused the water pump if it looks fine (also, people don't want to pay for new water pumps when they have me do their guides).

For what it's worth, I've never had a water pump fail in my ownership of any BMW, or any car for that matter. Dunno if I'm really lucky or if I don't keep cars long enough, haha.

Yes this should have been changed at the time of guides and the thermostat. 100K since the last change is indication enough that it should have been changed. Really the entire cooling system should have been overhauled and thus this event should have been avoided.

Well I guess this is one time "looks good" outweighs the reality of the situation. Yes you have been lucky but it didn't extend to the next owner.

To some degree understandable from a "flip" perspective. It was working great all the way up to the point it wasn't :rofl:

My philosophy of buy and hold for long term use and high reliability has been and continues to be if I'm working on something in one of my vehicles and touching stuff that has already delivered more or less in the 100K miles range, I'm replacing it. Touch it once and receive longer reliability of that section of the vehicle. :dunno: :dunno:

Glad that the new owner didn't experience a fatal overheat and got it to the side of the road in time :thumbup:

Mike

I'd say it's a combination of those two. :D I've had 3 water pumps fail in the 15+ BMW's. The ones that did not experience failures were typically because I replaced them before failure. Any BMW water pump +100,000 miles is starting to hit borrowed time. I replaced them in all BMW's that got flipped.

In the future though, unless the owner can prove they replaced the pump and thermostat in the last 30,000 miles... I'd insist on a water pump and thermostat while doing the guides. I couldn't imagine doing all that work and not doing those 2, in addition to tensioners, and other front end components.

^That's just my .02 though obviously. You keep doing you as it's obviously been working for you. :thumbup:

The funny thing is that I probably would have changed the water pump if the X5 was planned to be a flip— in this case I didn't change the water pump because I was intending to keep the X5 for a long time so I figured I'd just replace it when it went bad.

I hear you on that line of reasoning. A water pump is a stranding situation though so I try to change them rather than wait. I just don't like seeing a BMW stranded on the side of the road... let alone MY BMW. ;) :D

:iagree:

Running obvious rotable parts (water pumps, thermostats, alternators, belts, hoses, brakes, rotors, etc.) to failure when PM could insure higher reliability has never been my philosophy in my vehicles.

However, I do understand the budget busting challenges of BMW maintenance.

Mike

Yeah, budget is my main reason. That and the fact that I have multiple cars means that ultimate reliability isn't really a big concern. I don't have a super important job or people that rely on me for anything super important, so even if broke down somewhere it would only be a minor inconvenience.

I full support PM but since most parts can have quite different lifecycles, I don't replace costly parts such as a water pump or alternator until there are symptoms of failure other than when I have to take parts like that off to fix something else. I used to do that many years ago and gave or sold the used parts, primarily to friends. Very often the part was still working fine after many more thousands of miles. There's obviously risk. AAA is my backup.