I want to preface this post by saying two things about BMW. First, I have always loved that round headlight look, and second, I always thought that they would bankrupt me to own.
The latter being the reason why I had never seriously considered owning one, and the former being the reason why I could never stop looking at them. Mmm those kidney grills get me every time. About 6 years ago I got my first real job and I wanted to upgrade from the old MkII VW Golf I was driving to something a little more modern and so I picked up a 2006 Acura TSX. I had bought into the idea that, since it was Japanese, it would be reliable, and since it was basically a Honda, parts for it even if I did need to fix it would be cheap. It boasted about 205bhp, had a 6 speed manual transmission, and had a reasonably nice interior.
At first I thought it was sporty, and this was mostly because I was uninitiated in the ways of the sports sedan. It turned out that the 6 speed manual didn’t have any better gear ratios than the 5 speed in my old VW, the gears were just closer together. This car had two fatal flaws for me, it was difficult to work on, and the power band was atrocious.
VTEC is Unfinished Technology
When I say that the power band is atrocious, I mean that they programmed the mapping in the factory to make you short shift the vehicle and the gears (as short as they were) were too long to keep you in the power band. The below graph that I found at dashzracing.com illustrates the problem fairly well.
You will notice that there is a peak in the horsepower at about 5400rpm, and for the next 300rpm up to 5700rpm, you are actually getting less power. This is the important part. The car generating less power means that you feel less pressure pushing you into your seat. It makes you think it is time to shift. The steep upturn in the graph after that is when VTEC kicks in. That spike in power happens very fast and it can be very exciting. Unfortunately, you don’t have very far until you hit the redline, which I want to say was somewhere around 6700rpm, and then it is time to shift.
Shifting gears in this car sends you down below 5700rpm, and so suddenly you are off of the power. This results in a horrendous jolt that you would think will give you whiplash if you do it too much, and then you hit the power again, and you are thrown back in your seat again by the VTEC activation. This took a lot of the fun out of spirited driving. There are companies that advertise that they can get rid of the dip in power by simply flashing the ECU, which they charge about $500 to do. I never had the guts to try this, because the closest place I could find at the time that would do it was in Vegas, and it seemed like a lot to gamble on making the car suck a little less (by making it suck in more air).
In the end, I think Honda should be embarrassed to consider this sort of mapping finished enough to sell to customers. It really was a nightmare to drive and it felt like false advertising, because you would need a chiropractor after finding where the engine made it’s power for just a few seconds.
Honda = Hard on the Knuckles
I didn’t ever have to really do anything that complicated on this vehicle while I had it. From the standpoint that nothing broke, it was kind of true, but then again it wasn’t. In a lot of ways, there were just a lot of things that I learned to live without, because I didn’t feel like fixing them.
The car was only 4 years old when I got it and most of the power door lock actuators had already quit. Remember what I said about cheap parts? I replaced the passenger door actuator in the front, so that when I would have one passenger, I could unlock their door at the same time as I used the key to unlock the drivers door. I never really worried about the back doors, and most of the time they just stayed locked. Worry about breaking the thin plastic trim pieces after fixing the front passenger door probably kept me from doing the rear doors the most.
While I owned the car, I made sure that all regular maintenance was done on time, and I did the maintenance myself to make sure that it was done right. Then my clutch hydraulics went out. This seemed like it should be easy to do, so I bought the parts for about $200 so I could replace them and went to work. This job should have been simple, but I had to remove so many parts out of the engine bay, including the battery, the brake booster, and several intake parts, and even then, the master cylinder was buried so far behind the strut tower, that you could barely see it, let alone touch it.
Well, I fixed the clutch hydraulics and the car went trouble free for about a year, until once again my foot went to the floor and the clutch didn’t disengage. At this point I made the false assumption that the problem couldn’t be the hydraulics, because I just changed them 1 year ago. Never underestimate the depravity of cheap parts, so I decided to take it to a shop to have them diagnose it. It cost me $90 for a tow. The shop told me the next day that I needed a new clutch, and that the problem was likely in the throwout bearing. This job cost me $2600. I looked it up on RepairPal.com, and sure enough, that was in the ballpark at the time of what it should cost, because of how difficult it was to get to the clutch.
BMW = Cheaper to Maintain
This is where I started seriously looking at a BMW. I thought to myself. If it cost $2600 to change the clutch on what is basically a Honda Civic (or Accord in the Euro market), I bet it would be ridiculously expensive to do on a BMW 5 series. So I looked up on the same website a BMW 5 Series clutch replacement quote. This is where my jaw dropped and I immediately started shopping BMW. Even though the parts were more expensive, there was a lot less labor to the job, and the job was almost $900 cheaper.
Valvetronic, How Variable Lift Should Be Done
When I test drove my first BMW and felt that linear power band of the N52B30 engine, I knew that I had to get back in a german car. I traded in my TSX for a 2007 BMW X5. In this I went from a compact sedan to an SUV and had more fun driving the car. How can this be? The answer is the BMW Valvetronic system.
Valvetronic uses an eccentric intermediate shaft in order to vary the lift of the valves practically infinitely between the low and high lift points. It really is an elegant solution, and the neatest part about it, is that it means that the car uses valve lift modulation in order to throttle the intake air flow instead of using a butterfly valve actuated throttle body. While the engine still has a throttle body on the intake manifold, as soon as the car is started, it sticks that to wide open throttle and you basically have atmospheric pressure right outside the valves.
If you don’t believe me that a BMW drives better and is easier to work on, then go test drive one, and look under the hood. The parts may be more expensive, and you may have to Buy a few More Wrenches (haha BMW), but the work will almost always be easier to do.