2006 BMW M3

[Jake]

364 days and about 13,500 miles of ownership, and she's gone.





Sold to my buddy Robb from Virginia Beach. He's a fellow BMW nerd who owns a clownshoe Z3M coupe, and this will take over daily duties from his lifted 4Runner.

It was an incredibly fun car, that looked great and largely treated me well. Still felt pretty modern as a daily driver (which my E36 'vert did not). Great highway manners and decent mileage (26ish highway) made it a solid companion for the road trips it saw.

I took it to JMU a few times, Charlottesville and Richmond at least once apiece, New Jersey for a friend's wedding, and all over Northern Virginia. It saw a lot of the DC streets and thankfully not many DC potholes.

Unfortunately, owning an "un-bulletproofed" S54 was also pretty nerve-wracking. Maybe the internet got the best of my head, maybe the fears are real. Either way, my car had no subframe reinforcement, no VANOS work, and original rod bearings. It drove incredibly well, but I always had the idea of "either do this $1500 maintenance or deal with a $3k problem later" in the back of my head - and I didn't want to deal with either.

It was a fun year, but I was also very glad to see it go. This will enable my move into DC (well, once the trailer situation is updated) and for now, I'm fine daily-driving a cushy automatic brick of excess power. The S54 + 6 speed was fairly annoying in commuter type of driving, given the traffic I see.

Cheers, homie.