I assume you’re talking about the n52 vs n20. I’ve had both engines as daily drivers, and they’re both fine. The n20 has a bad rap due to early models failing from a timing chain guides breaking.
They suffer from some of the same problem your likely modern fridge does, and then kick it up two notches.
In the name of "safety", they have made design decisions such as integrating fuses directly into the very large and expensive control boards and making them non-replacable. Just in case this wasn't enough, they also tend to blow an OTP so that in the event that you have the know how to replace the fuses anyways, nothing will work. Naturally you also cannot just swap in a replacement board, as it needs to go through the same pairing process to the ECU as things like the car doors, which in most cases requires an active certificate/license on the ecu programmer that only dealerships/oem have.
In theory they should be, but EVs also tend to be more computerised, proprietary and locked down than ICE cars, so in practice I think it's not as simple as that.
For example there was that case of the car that needed an entire new sealed €5k battery controller because it was in a minor crash and blew a fuse.
My garage charges 50% more for labour on EVs. I'm sure part of that is price discrimination but I bet part is also because working on them is more difficult. I would not be surprised if they need to pay more for access to the manufacturer's diagnostic tools too, which are becoming increasingly required.
If you take care of the car it’s just brake pads, tires, rotors. Pads and rotors are really simple to DIY. Tires are more expensive than like… an Elantra, but if you’re buying a 60k car you can afford 1.2k in tires… otherwise don’t buy the car.
If you get into an accident or let the bmw get into disrepair via neglect, yeah it’s not cheap to clean up. Body work is expensive on any car though, and I don’t have sympathy for people who own higher-end cars and don’t take care of them, they deserve to pay the price for it.
It's more than that though. Any repairs due to wear and tear or whatever, ends up being really expensive. Although you can probably reduce the costs a bit if you get the non-branded OEM part or potentially the same part from another manufacturer (e.g. the toyota supra uses a lot of bmw parts so if the toyota part might be cheaper than the same bmw part).
That was my whole point actually, the wear and tear is really minimal if you get regular oil changes. Things don’t just break and need replacing. Tires, rotors, brakes, those wear out. The tires are not cheap, rotors and pads aren’t crazy expensive and super easy to DIY.
If you had bought a 7 or 5 Series at that time, you would not have had that experience. The 2001 7 Series had something like a 25% roadside breakdown rate.
So like... One in four cars would break down at the side of the road before it was otherwise EOL? One roadside breakdown every 800,000 miles or so? That really doesn't sound bad.
Owned a BMW. Had the audacity to use non-BMW windshield washer fluid. The fluid sensor broke; because in a BMW it’s a fancy sensor that is only compatible with specific washing fluids. Sums up my experience with that car. It was nice to sit in, though.
Mostly just tires and minor maintenance. You're unlikely to need pad and rotor replacements unless you're driving as if you were on a racetrack every single day.
With daily EV driving you have the opposite problem - regen means you rarely, if ever, actually activate the brakes, so you get rust on them that you need to clean out.
Interesting to think about the cost of training a LLM to understand that it’s operating within an unknown number of larger contexts versus sending that quote to an edgy intern.
I am a sucker for cultural reference jokes, esp if it’s some subculture that I am/have been a member of (e.g. IRC in the late 90s/00s). It’s fun to find a connection to a stranger, even if it’s vague and superficial. It’s something like that feeling of familiarity and comfort you get when you sing along with a song you know all the words to.
(The score on my post above has been bouncing around all over the place, lol. The fun police are definitely out in full force. I’ll stop having fun when I’m dead, thank you.)
There is a tourist attraction here in New Zealand that started its life as a way for a potter, Barry Brickell, to get his clay and fuel for the kilns to his studio. It’s a beautiful spot, particularly if you manage to avoid a busy time.
On a night train such as the Transsib that takes several days to get from A to B anyway, being able to sleep through it and not needing to lug your stuff around is usually considered more important.
(Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)
> (Although in some cases you are woken up for border formalities.)
Yeah although you can just stay in bed for this. I've been on the train. The Chinese officials just wake you up, stamp your passport, and off you go to sleep.
Then the Mongolian officials came on, asked me a couple questions to see whether I respected their country, why I was going there, grumbled something unintelligble, stamped my passport and moved on.
Much better than getting in line for 2 hours if you ask me (which is what happened at the Bulgaria/Turkey border and the Georgia/Armenia border when I crossed those)
Yeh the style read like a human, but you’re right, some dashes, annoyingly I have historically used a lot of - in my writing so now I need to stop using them
That’s the brand not a specific device these days Apple is selling well over 200 million phones a year.
The original iPhone sold 6.1 million units in its lifetime and topped out at the 3rd most popular phone in the US, being dramatically less popular in Europe etc. IE less than 2% of current annual sales.
By comparison just the base model iPhone 15 was the most popular phone globally for 3 quarters excluding the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 15 Pro which where close. Part of that is just being a way better phone in terms of battery life and being significantly more resistant to water etc.
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