BMW Owner Completes $17,000 in Repairs for Under $700

When someone decides to buy a vehicle with over 600,000 kilometers, two thoughts come to mind: either they're crazy, or they know exactly what they're doing. Alex Palmeri from the LegitStreetCars channel falls into the second category, but when he contacted the official BMW dealership to repair and service his E39 M5, he received a quote of $17,000. The solution? Reproduce each step of the work order, and do it on his own.

The vast majority of car repair anecdotes I've heard tend to be true horror stories. The most common versions range from "he did a bad job / didn't fix anything" to "he asked me for a fortune," and that's why more and more people are turning to the Web for information and to carry out their own repairs.

Now, it's clear that Alex Palmeri from the LegitStreetCars channel has an advantage. He has the proper support to lift his vehicle, a spacious garage, and a healthy variety of tools, but even he was staggered when the official BMW dealership asked him for $17,000 for a general repair of his E39 M5 with over 600,000 kilometers. Another person would take that car straight to the junkyard; however, the quote became a challenge:

The Dealer's Questionable Quotes

In the first place, he found some diagnostic errors. For example: They were asking for more than $1,400 to replace the valve cover gasket to fix a leak, but what was actually leaking (because the previous owner had recently changed the gasket) was the oil cap, a replacement of just $25. How much does the gasket kit cost? $50 at most.

$614 for a missing plastic part, which can be obtained OEM on eBay for less than $50. Replacement of belts and pulleys? $188 versus $1,400. For some repairs he needed phone help (Palmei admits he had never worked on a BMW before), but they all follow the same pattern: a relatively inexpensive part, between 30 minutes and an hour of work, and savings that in certain cases exceed 90 percent.

Let's be honest: when someone asks for more than $300 for an oil change, let's say they "don't have the system properly calibrated." I admit some cars can demand very high sums, but the point is that here they recommend changing things that don't need to be replaced, they make diagnostic errors... and they make an estimated quote of $17,000, when the parts cost less than $700. That's a... 16,300 reasons to learn on our own.