2010: The Story: Ryan’s 2000 BMW E39 M5:

Alt text

All cars have a story, and I’m about to get very carried away telling mine. It’ll be long, detailed, and full of links to YouTube videos and website articles that I have written through the process. This is nearly a decade in the making, after all.

Sunday, July 18th, 2010. 6:42pm. The corner of Village Way and Library Street, in the midwestern town of Hudson, Ohio. I was in the downtown area of my community with my grandparents at a concert on our square. During intermission, we always took a little stroll to get some ice cream. This stroll happened to be a tad more expensive, but much more fun. My M5 was poorly backed in to a spot, showing it’s age with the pre-facelift headlights, a gaudy front license plate, and more than a handful of stone chips in the hood and front bumper. There was an orange For Sale sign on the inside of the windshield, displaying the car’s year, make, model, and the owner’s phone number. I snapped a few photos with my iPhone 4, hence the exact aforementioned date and time. My grandparents were a lot less excited about the car than I was.

I should mention that I’ve always been a car enthusiast. Not only a car enthusiast, but a European car enthusiast, thanks to my dad. When I was a kid, he had a 1991 Porsche 964 Turbo. From 2003-2006, he drove a tastefully optioned BMW 530i/5 Sport. In 2004, he purchased a 1998 Ferrari 355 F1 Spider from Florida. Being around a car-nut, I guess it rubbed off. Luckily for me, he had good taste.

It was probably a mixture of the Internet and Top Gear that taught me what an M5 is. I knew it was a sport version of BMW’s 5-series model. I knew it had power, technology, and a hefty price tag. My best friend and I used to bike around our town all summer, totaling some 2,500 miles per season. I can remember seeing a jet-black E39 M5 downtown, turning around, and pedaling back to look at it. I appreciated what it was, but never thought that I’d own one. Looking back in my iPhoto archives from 2009-2010, I have several pictures of my car poorly-parked around town. I always saw it, knew it was an M5, and snapped a photo. Little did I know it would be mine one day. And fuel my business. Here are a few photos of the car I took before I owned it.

July 18th, 2009

Alt text

I spotted an M5, and decided to take a photo. I had no idea that exactly 365 days later, I would spot this exact car for sale- and buy it.

Alt text

Notice the green/beige bike in the background. My trusty Truck Navigator 300 represented my wheels before the M5.

Alt text

Photo quality has come a long way in the past decade.

Alt text

I told you it was poorly parked!

Alt text

July 18th, 2010 For sale

Alt text

Shortly after finding my future M5 for sale, I found myself on my bike at our local favorite local restaurant, Yours Truly. I gave my dad a call and told him of my find. We didn’t have any immediate plans to buy my first car, but I always have been one to push the buck early. I told him what it was, and that I really liked it, and he laughed at the idea of a 16-year-old even thinking about a BMW M5. I remember what he said over the phone “exactly what every 16-year-old needs, a BMW M5.” That night, I remember staying up for hours doing research on the car. YouTube videos, reviews from when it was new, and research about its reliability and maintenance. I fell in love with nearly everything that I found. The next day was a Monday, so I called the number on the for sale sign. It was hard to tell if the last digit was a 1 or 6, as the sign was very low behind the windshield. I tried my luck with a 1, and reached a mental hospital. The 6 got me to the middle-aged second owner of the car, Dave. I told Dave that I had seen the car downtown, and that I really liked what I saw. I asked how many miles the car had, and how much he wanted for it. I found that the car had 147,347 miles, and that the price seemed reasonable at $12,900. I told Dave that I’d ‘think about it’, and ‘call him back later.’ I got my grandfather and dad to agree to go over and look at the car, drive it, and see if it would be a good fit. Dave turned out to live about 1.5 miles closer to town than I did, so the trip was short. His 5-bay garage housed the M5, a Z3M, a C5 Corvette, his E39 M5 replacement 2008 E60 M5 6-speed, and some little red project car (MG?) We spent our first 15 minutes talking with Dave about the car, and inspecting its condition more closely. We found that the car had been meticulously cared for, but was driven as his daily driver for the past 7 years. We found the usual signs of use, stone chips on the front, slightly-foggy headlights, and the typical pre-facelift trim wear on the interior center console, shift knob, and parking-brake handle. We decided that we should take the car on a short drive, so we piled into the M5. We just took a short ride down his street, to highway 480, and then back into town. My dad drove, since I didn’t even have my temporary license yet. 90MPH felt as stable as can be. I remember my first ride in the M5’s passenger seat, it felt smaller than I expected, but very well built and comfortable. I was really taken away with how tight everything felt. The array of buttons for the radio and climate-control looked impressive, and the car felt very solid and powerful. My dad backed the car back into Dave’s driveway, and begun the negotiation process. $900 off the asking price later, and I saw a handshake. Thats a feeling that I’ll never forget.

Dave and my dad agreed to meet at our bank in town the following Tuesday to exchange a cashier’s check for a set of keys, extra front style 65 wheels, and a thick folder of service history. 8:00AM was our meeting time, which is the middle of the night for a teenager on summer break. I told my best friend Kennan of the news. He was nearly as excited as I was to come with us to pick it up. After the finances were taken care of, we walked out to the car to bring it home. I remember electing to ride in the back seat, and let Kennan take the passenger seat. My ride home was very comfortable, the car felt so tight and solid in comparison to anything I had ever ridden in before.

Alt text

Pickup day. July 27th, 2010 at 9:17am.

Once the car was at home, Kennan and I set to giving it a good wash. We removed the license plate, and found tons of grime; this was not acceptable! The rest of the car wasn’t at all filthy, but being as picky as I am, it had to be cleaned by me. Washing the M5 gave me the opportunity to look over the entire car in detail, and learn more about it. I remember how Kennan and I couldn’t figure out how to open the fuel filler door to dry the water out from behind it. On any other car I had washed, there was a button to release the door from inside the car. This was not the case with the M5. We later found out that with the doors unlocked, all you have to do is push the door in. A few hours later, the car met my stringent cleaning standards. My dad got in and tried to start it to move it back over to the far side of the garage. Click, click, click. Shit. Day 1, and the battery is dead. We didn’t even have the radio on while we washed the car. My dad jumped it from his car, and put a charger on it for the night. We decided a few days later just to replace the battery, and get a fresh start with that part of the car under our ownership.

Now that I had a car, I had motivation to get my license, and to learn how to drive a manual transmission. I knew that I wanted a 3-pedal car, due to the more involved and connected driving experience. I always dreamed of this being an E36 325i/238i, so this M5 exceeded even my wildest of dreams.

In all of my feverish research on the car, I noticed that mine looked different. The sticker on the inside of the driver’s door said mine was 02/00 production model, dating it as pre-facelift. My headlights, tail lights, and interior trim was slightly different. Slightly… not as nice. My first bad decision was with the headlights, I bought the infamous cheapo-Depo lights from Ebay. They looked vastly better, but were nothing compared to the real genuine Hella lights. I now had halos, but with 5 very noticeable LEDs in each ring. Regardless, it was an improvement over what I had. The front plate came off, it got nice wax, and my driving with 3 pedals was coming along very smoothly.

July 27th, 2010

Home. In my garage, all cleaned up. Gracefully sleeping with the Rossa Corsa Ferrari that spawned my car love.

Alt text