Junkyard Find: 1994 BMW 530i
Published: July 11th, 2016
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Because BMWs of the last quarter-century tend to be complex machines, intolerant of owners who flake on maintenance and expensive to fix once all those deferred problems result in a major failure, American self-service junkyards are full of Bavarian machinery. I see dozens of discarded E30 s, E28 s, and E36 s every year, and hundreds of scrapped 7 Series cars. I’m not sufficiently interested to raise my camera and document their demise most of the time. However, an E34 5 Series with V8 and manual transmission isn’t something you see every day in the junkyard.Here’s a ’94 that I shot in a yard in California’s Central Valley last week.
In fact, I do shoot some BMWs for this series; for example, we have seen this 1998 Z3, the occasional 2002, and even an über-rare 1965 BMW 700. I’ll photograph a junked E30 pretty soon, I promise.
This one has the look of a much-abused track-day car, with its trashed one-piece Sparco seat and rear seat that doesn’t match the rest of the upholstery (suggesting that a weight-shedding owner ditched the original rear seat and a subsequent owner picked up a replacement at the junkyard).
By the middle 1990s, American 3-Series buyers were still getting manual transmissions in large numbers, but few were the BMW shoppers who opted for three pedals in a bigger car.
Cosmetically challenged E34s are very cheap, and so we see quite a few in the 24 Hours of LeMons race series. The six-cylinder cars have done well, winning their share of races, but BMW V8s have some severe reliability problems in this sort of racing. Still, a car like today’s 530i is a lot of fun on a road course.
It’s a near-certainty that someone will grab the transmission and pedal assembly from this car before it gets stuffed into The Crusher, but the engine out of a (non-wrecked) car like has about as much chance of getting rescued as a 250,000-mile Jaguar V12.
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BMW pitched this car as a sensible daily driver.[Images: © 2016 Murilee Martin/The Truth About Cars]
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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I get to watch these at Chump car quite a bit, expensive road cars but great budget racers when you can throw out the electrical crap. Given some local recent events involving armed robbers, driving a BMW, and targeting kids via Pokemon Go, and a certain Matthew Brodrick incident. I dont have a favorable outlook on BMWs. But then again I never liked cars that require special brand sourced tools.
old mercs and bmw's are "the shit" those days this side of the pond, or in the pond really in my case, olds mercs have always bin.. from the 50's to the 90's they made some of highest quality cars ever made, and therefore they take there time to die, there are Sh*tloads of old w124's, w210's w201 still around over here, if you go out.. you will see at least few of them, many of the old beemers seem to hold up fine, my family car is and old E320 4matic, at the moment it is making me crazy, but it still is a sweet car