I am interested in buying a used 1995 BMW 318ti. I have not gotten to drive the vehicle, it is on a used car lot and they were closed today.(Sat,go figure that one?) I've noticed the car on the lot for about a month.Does anyone have any info. on how reliable these cars are? The price on the car is $5,500.00. I did the "CarFax" report, everything came back clean. I could not see the mileage, because its electronic.The carfax report said it was registered in the D.C./ Va. area, the mileage reported in 4/04 was 135,000 The car looks good from the outside, no obvious damage. I would just like to know what to look for when I test drive and what is a fair price for the car.
A price can't be determined without the options. A "clean" condition and fairly loaded one in the DC area, should fetch no more than $4,000 as an asking, retail price. That would assume 150,000 miles by now.
If you are interested, go look at it on Monday and drive it.
I have a 96 with 160,000 on it with trouble free operation. The only problems that I have had was a leaky hose in a minnesota january, so I would just top it off, but forgot one day and it ran low. It then ground up the seal in the water pump and I ended up replacing all of them. Hoses would have been a minor repair, but lazyness didn't pay off. Other than that it has been a good car, in three year I have put on 90,000 abusive miles, including taking it out to the dragstrip. It's not very fast but is consistant. The only other things that I have done was mostly regular maintenance, like plugs, plug wires, O2 sensors, oil changes, differential fluid change, manual transmission fluid change, cooleant change, belts, and I had to put in new ball joints because I went over some suspension wrecking speed bumps (The things were like hitting a curb stone)
As far as price 3 years ago with 80,000 on mine I paid $7000, it might be worth $3000 now because mine has the sport wheels, traction control, leather, and fog lights, but I would say anything over $3500 should be walked away from. The ti was the bottom of the line car at BMW the years it was made. Mine is a really good car, don't expect alot of power I think the engine was a 138hp engine in a heavy car. By compairson my wife drives a 2000 VW jetta with the 2.0L engine, my ti gets better gas mileage, has more power, handles better, and has had fewer repairs, this from a car that is almost twice as old and has 3 times the miles on it.
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