Buying an E46 BMW Pt 2 (All the things I missed when I bought mine)
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TechTranscript
00:00Okay, so now we're in the car. There's a lot of stuff to look for in here, so make
00:04sure you turn it on, and before you even bother driving it, check everything out
00:08on the dashboard. Look at the gauge cluster. Are there any lights on? Is there
00:13a check engine light? You'll need to get that checked out if you don't have your
00:16own code reader. Alright, turn all of the lights on. Check the horn. Make sure that
00:22everything's working. The radio. Here's a few things that I didn't catch on my E46.
00:26My high beams work when I click the flash to pass button, but when I flick
00:32them forward, the high beams don't come on. My handbrake. This is important to
00:38check out. It's good, but it doesn't engage early enough. I'll probably need
00:43to replace the shoes soon. If you don't know how to do that yourself, it's an
00:46expensive fix. Make sure you make sure the handbrake is working properly. Oh,
00:50here's another thing that's not working on mine. Oh, I think I'll just open the
00:56sunroof. Make sure you check everything out before you buy a car. Now, let's take
01:06it for a drive. Start the car up if you haven't already. If it's a manual, feel
01:10the clutch. What does it feel like? Start to roll the car forward. Where is the
01:14engagement point on the clutch? Okay, is it really close to the end? The clutch is
01:19maybe coming to the end of its life. There's lots of videos out there on how
01:23to tell if your clutch is good in your car. Driving the car on flat ground can
01:27only tell you so much. You need to find some bumps, because there's a lot of
01:31bushings and ball joints in a suspension system, especially in a sophisticated car
01:35like this. You have to see what is actually going on under there. Sometimes
01:41you can't tell just by looking. I'm going to turn here, actually. So, I don't have any
01:47ground here to tell you, but what I recommend doing is finding a driveway
01:50that goes up a little bit of a bump, and driving up on it on a little bit of an
01:54angle. Okay, so if you do, you put a little bit of lateral stress on the
01:59chassis, and you see what the suspension is capable of doing. Do you hear a
02:02kthunk-thunk? Could be a bunch of different things. Could be bushings on
02:07the control arms. It could be sway bar issues. It could be, there's so many
02:13bushings and ball joints down there that it's going to be something, not the end
02:17of the world, but something to definitely consider. Now, these cars have a tendency
02:22to lose a little bit of low-end power over time, if things like the fuel filter
02:27or the fuel pump or a multitude of other things actually cause it to kind of gung
02:35up and not work just as it should. Even a 325 like this, this is the 3.5 litre
02:40engine, sorry, I wish, is a 2.5 litre engine in Line 6, just like most of them
02:46are, except for the 318. Even this one is going to give you a fair amount of kick,
02:51all right? This is in second gear. You put your foot down, you should feel it.
02:58Oh, here's another thing that I didn't catch when I bought my car. Window
03:02regulators on an E46 are very prone to going, okay? There's a lot of plastic
03:07parts in these BMWs that kind of went overboard with the plastic parts, in my
03:10opinion, and you end up with issues like this. Okay, so I didn't even go down, it's
03:15never done that before. All right, so windows down, great, went down pretty
03:18easily. It's because gravity was helping it. On the way up,
03:24okay, that wasn't actually that bad, but usually it hesitates a little bit as it
03:29comes up. You can kind of hear the motor slow down. It should go up, it should go
03:33up quickly and cleanly, just like a normal window would on any car. So that's
03:37something to think about. Check all the windows and the sunroof.
03:43Hey, there's an E46 right now. See, his is running just great.
03:49Wave.
03:52Seems like a nice guy. All right, I know I've covered a lot of material, but you
03:57have to make sure that after this video, you go on to the website that I put in
04:02the link at the beginning. I'll put it in the actual description as well. Go to
04:06E46 Fanatics and read, read, read. There is no substitute for having knowledge
04:11when you're going to look for one of these cars. There's a lot of things that
04:15can go wrong with these, especially the high mileage ones, and if you're buying
04:18an E46, chances are it's pretty high mileage. Okay, so I hope I've answered
04:23some of the questions that you might have had about what to look for when
04:25shopping for your first BMW E46. Please feel free to like and subscribe, and I'll
04:30be bringing you more videos like this, as well as reviews of performance parts
04:34and DIYs. See you next time.