My 1987 BMW 325is – Meals on Wheels Led to This Deal

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– Posted on August 8, 2024

The call came on my cell phone when I was at work. “Is this Mark Jeanerette? I’m with your mother…she’s in her car upside down.”

My mother – well into her 70s – had been delivering for Meals on Wheels during a snow squall when her car slid. The right front wheel struck the wingwall of a culvert and her car flipped over into a ditch. Unhurt but hanging upside down from her seat belt, she groped for and managed to lay hands on her flip phone. But decades of landline use had left her unable to fathom the workings of a cell phone, namely that there’s no dial tone. That this particular model – a supposedly senior-friendly Jitterbug – required you to hold down the red “hangup” button to turn the phone on also made no sense to her. So I’d practiced it with her many times, until I thought she had the hang of using it. Turns out she didn’t, which was why a Good Samaritan was calling me from the roadside where he had stopped to help her. (By the way, am I going to hell because I find the idea of her hanging upside down in her car fumbling with a phone kind of funny? Because I do.)

A ’99 Infiniti G20. Photo credit: Infiniti

 

Her car, a ’99 Infiniti G20, was a total loss after the rollover. It was about 10 years old at that point and I was convinced she wouldn’t get a decent replacement value for it. So I hatched a plan to give her my car – a 2007 Mazda6 wagon – and find another car for myself to drive.

A Mazda6 wagon like mine. Credit: Edmunds

 

And that was how I found a 1987 BMW 325is a couple hours away near Cleveland. The Craigslist ad was short on details, but it looked good in photos and the price was decent. In person, there were disappointments – the paint on the roof had perished, the driver’s door didn’t close properly, etc. – but overall, it was solid and rust-free. All the accessories worked, including the factory stereo, and the dash was uncracked. It ran perfectly. The seller and I made a deal and she talked about how it would be a relief to unload the BMW since all her co-workers confused it for a much newer, more expensive BMW. I shot her a little side-eye at this. Nobody in the year of our lord 2009 was mistaking a boxy, little 22-year old E30 with rough paint for anything built since Bill Clinton played sax on Arsenio. But whatever, I gave her the money and I drove the car home.

A knocking sound manifested itself on the drive home. It turned out to be a loose bolt in the front subframe, easily fixed. The door issue was a broken hinge, also easy.

I sifted through the thick file of invoices the seller had given me and realized they went all the way back to when the car was new. Counting up the names, I discovered the little E30 had passed through the hands of seven previous owners. Yet somehow it had mostly escaped the fate of most expensive European cars on the used market, which is to get passed along to less and less affluent buyers, accumulating the effects of neglect and careless maintenance.

I had the roof and front air dam repainted and the clearcoat redone all over. I replaced the muffler, the tires, and the pressurized struts in the front sports seats that gave them their various height and tilt adjustments. I fixed the A/C and had it charged. I found a cheap little gadget on eBay that let me add remote operation to the power locks. I added Homelink buttons, but I did it so carefully that it looked like a factory job. I replaced the timing belt and water pump, and when the little nylon gear that drove the odometer broke at about 170,000 miles, I fixed it as soon as possible and manually advanced the odometer based on knowing about how many miles I drive per week. God, how I wish more people would do this. Instead, you see ads saying “The odometer broke a couple years ago but it doesn’t bother me so I never fixed it. It’s probably got about 10,000 miles more than what it shows.”

That’s about all I had to do to the E30 to make it a reliable and comfortable daily runner. With Bosch Motronic engine management, it started and ran perfectly in all conditions. With A/C, cruise and power windows, it had all the gadgets I needed. I drove it down to Florida to see the last shuttle launch and up to Chicago to visit friends. It was quick and handled well. In fact, I told myself that in an alternate timeline, it was the car I would have bought back in 1991 instead of the Nissan SE-R I did buy.

The E30 abounds with neat little details. The trunk hinges are drilled for weight reduction and intrude so little on trunk space they make Lexus’s pantographic hinges look like an unnecessary flex, pun intended. Did you know the door locks have a sort of deadbolt feature? You turn the key in the lock to secure the door, but then there’s an extra detent past lock that is somehow “extra locked.” I don’t quite get it, but it’s a cool detail.

Then I made the dumbest automotive decision of my life, which was that if an E30 was good, then an E28 – say a nice 535i – would be better. I sold the E30 to a man and his son, who didn’t mind at all that they would be owners number nine. I then set about finding a nice E28 5-series. That’s when I realized that when I wasn’t paying attention, prices of E30s and E28s had been shooting up. I had possibly sold the 325 for too cheap, and I definitely wasn’t going to be finding an E28 for what I was willing to pay. So I remain without an ‘80s BMW to this day. I tried to console myself with a newer Beemer – and that was a disaster.

The lucky father and son I sold my E30 to.

 

My mother, by the way, received an unexpectedly generous payout from her insurance. Instead of taking my Mazda6, she bought a used New Beetle, which turned out to be a bit troublesome. Tired of watching me work on its several issues, my then-partner bought her a new Ford Focus for something like $11,000. She accepted it gracefully but actually disliked it because it didn’t have power windows and didn’t look like a New Beetle. And the Mazda6 wagon? I sold it to an attorney who specialized in representing UAW members. He needed a wagon built with UAW labor and the Mazda6 was about the only thing that fit that description. So if we’re keeping score, that’s one happy lawyer, one happy father and son, one dissatisfied mom, and one blogger kicking himself for selling his E30.