Junkyard Find: 1998 BMW Z3
One of the interesting things about frequenting high-inventory-turnover wrecking yards is that you get a sense of when a vehicle’s value has reached a certain “not worth fixing when it breaks” threshold.
There will be no examples of this type of car in such yards, and then suddenly I’ll see a half-dozen in the space of a few months; the Mazda Miata was such a car, being extremely rare until about 2008, at which point you could count on finding a couple at most California U-Wrench-It-type yards. The BMW Z3 appears to have reached that point about now, with this one showing up in a Northern California yard that I visited last week.
Actually, I had some warning that I would be seeing Z3s in the big self-serve yards, because we had one show up at South Carolina 24 Hours of LeMons race last fall. The team found a wrecked insurance-total example on Copart for something like $3,000, then proceeded to sell off way more than that amount of parts to get the purchase cost below the LeMons budgetary limit (normally I would be very skeptical about the numbers in a deal like this, but the team documented all their parts sales with comprehensive and convincing thoroughness). The car didn’t win the race, but it was fairly quick.
Junkyarders picked over this Z3 real good by the time I saw it, which means Z3 interior parts are still quite valuable.
Judging from the stickers all over, this Z3’s last owner may not have belonged to a demographic with the income levels of the original purchaser.
Around the turn of the century, I worked as a technical writer at a software company in Multimedia Gulch, and the company’s incredibly confident top brass believed that we would be bigger than Microsoft within two years and the biggest corporation in the world within five years, tops. This meant that they needed to hire everyone they could, and the employee who referred the most new hires one month would be given a brand-new Z3.
This car, a blue roadster parked in the outdoor break area where we could see it through the office windows and feel inspired, would have been a ’99 or ’00 model, so it’s not the example we are seeing here … but it still reminded me of the stupid business decisions being made during the run-up to the Dot-Com Bubble.
Check out that cassette deck! No Janis Joplin in this German car!
So cool that even American cops in a Caprice will pull it over to take a drive.
The American-market ads were a little more aggro.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Anyone want to bet it was the headgasket blowing that doomed this one?
An upper income couple from MI retired to Maui, got a divorce, and she was left with a spare '98 Z3. Red, 2.8l with the spare hardtop, and [sigh] automatic. Now, Michigan, but only driven during summers. So, 12k on the clock when I bought it from her in '08, to replace a '89 Miata. A terrific car for the islands. Made short work of the Hana Highway when work occasionally took my wife out that way. In '12, we relocated to Oz on short notice, and couldn't take our late model LHD vehicles. The dealers snapped up my wife's Civic Hybrid. But, the Z3 was old enough a bank won't loan for it, and since they'd have to wait for a cash buyer, dealers would only offer me 2 or 3 grand. I said screw it, shipped it to CA for a family friend to enjoy, where it shares a garage with a Pantera.