BMW Long-term Ownership
Maintenance work to do outside the BMW schedule, or at a shorter interval than BMW standard.
I’ve been reading ‘round various 2 Series forums and threads related to long-term ownership and what sort of additional service work or actions are desirable, outside of the standard BMW service packages and decided to summarise it in a simple table, below. The table is divided into an initial section listing simple routine care and a second section on major mechanical work – usually replacements. Note this is just a survey exercise – it’s based only on what people have said, not on any engineering insight on my part, albeit on the insight and experience claimed by others.
If people have comments I'm happy to see what comes up and then incorporate them into a revised version. I'm not claiming this is definitive.
There always remains the statistical probability that any one of hundreds of components will fail unusually early. These things happen. The aim of these extra service measures is principally to minimise the incidence of failures over the ~40K mileage point i.e. for a long-term ownership. If you want insurance against almost any early failure, then you have to look at the cost/benefit of the various Extended Warranty schemes.
Forum discussions have a lot of variation in the specific mileage / time that people quote. For some items the range is quite wide – you’ll find at least one post form someone who recommends work earlier than stated here. Indeed, many threads contain arguments about both intervals, and whether a piece of preventive work is even necessary.
I’m assuming here that the owner has a standard service package from a BMW dealer, which will cover regular annual servicing in terms of an oil and air filter change, and brake fluid and brake pads at longer intervals. What the table is meant to do is to show what this won’t cover, or when service work needs to be done sooner than in a dealer’s service package.
Some service items such as differential oil and coolant are described by BMW as ‘lifetime’. This table reflects the general view that this isn’t true and that some of these parts are well worth replacing in a car that’s going to be owned outside of the standard 3 year warranty.
Finally, the table reflects advice for non-modified and/or non-tracked cars. The usual advice for these cases is that mechanical work should be done ‘earlier’ but how much earlier varied so much that I decided not to complicate the information with a lot of caveats and qualifiers.
(The charge pipe replacement is a one-off, not at repeated intervals.)
Other sources
There is an in-depth article from 2013 covering a wide range of topics and recommendations around maintenance of a long-term ownership BMW:
https://www.zpost.com/forums/attachm...9&d=1564415575
Unfortunately, it’s beginning to look a bit out of date and I have a concern that some of what was true for pre-2013 engines must surely have changed by now? Yes, much of it is interesting background, but after 8 years, it must need some revision. Basically, it's certainly worth reading, but may leave you with reservations about just how far some of the specific recommendations still apply to the current generation of BMWs.