Why This BMW Wagon Is The Best Car I’ve Ever Purchased For Just $3,000

On Friday night, I dragged another car home to the vehicle refuge I like to call Misty Motors. This one is yet another purchase that is so Mercedes: a high-mileage, at least a decade-old German car purchased for the princely sum of just $3,000. I’ve boughtd a ton of cars for around $3,000 in my life, but none of them were as great as this one. This 2007 BMW 530xi wagon is easily the best dirt cheap car that I’ve ever purchased, and of course, it came from our very own Daydreaming Designer.

One of the wonderful things about writing about cars is that I get exposed to so many different vehicles that I wouldn’t have ever seen at my tech job years ago. Our in-house BMW expert, Thomas Hundal, has found ways to plant the BMW bug in my head [Editor’s Note: He also gave me the idea to buy my i3. Thomas is a bad influence! -DT] and it’s working. First, I picked up (then immediately broke) a BMW X5 with a manual transmission then, in November, I picked up that wonderful E39 525iT wagon from the Bishop. Along the way, I’ve fallen deeply in love.

Yes, I still love my beloved Smarts and Volkswagens, but these older BMWs have offered an experience that I’ve yet to find anywhere else. These steeds have incredible throttle control, tight, sharp steering, and interiors that can make a bad day melt away.

I think I’ll steal what my wife said after she first drove the E39: It’s incredible, even a base model BMW is worlds apart from something like a base model Toyota.

Indeed, so when the opportunity came to triple-down on our BMW adventures, my wife and I pounced on it.

Doing Some Good

This time, picking up this BMW wasn’t just adding to my seemingly endless fleet. Before this purchase, my wife and I learned that my best friend was in dire need of a safe, reliable car. They haven’t had the best luck with cars in the past, and at the time, my bestie’s house of 13 had just one four-seater car to share. Well, between my wife and I, we have 17 cars, and surely one of them can help my friend out. I let my bestie choose and I tell you, she’s a smart cookie. She knew right away to run from my diesels, and that the little two-seater Smarts weren’t going to cut it.

Since my personal fleet has more red flags than a Chicago beach in wintertime, my friend asked about our 2010 Toyota Prius.

Well, that’s a great choice! The Carvana-purchased Prius has easily been our most reliable car, only letting us down once when its 12V battery forgot to do its main job. And as luck would have it — for my friend, anyway — Sheryl was getting mighty bored with her reliable appliance. There’s nothing wrong with the Prius, but she got no excitement from driving it. The car was ultra-dependable transportation and not much else.

Sheryl and I concocted an idea. So, my bestie wants the Prius, Sheryl is bored with the Prius, and I have two cars that Sheryl has been wanting for a while. Seems like we can work out a win-win.

Thus, we decided to give my friend the Prius. Yes, we paid about $13,000 for it in 2021 and yes, if Sheryl hated it so much she could have just sold it. However, I like being able to help when I can. Knowing my bestie is able to get a full night’s sleep without driving people to work at 3 in the morning? That’s worth the cost of admission to us. She now has a safe and maintained vehicle to get around in.

You Get A BMW And You Get A BMW!

There’s another benefit to this, too, and it’s that Sheryl finally gets to own one of my cars that she dreams about. At first, this was supposed to be my 2012 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI. I replaced this car back in 2022 with a 2010 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI with a manual transmission, so I had no need to keep the automatic version around.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t transfer the car to Sheryl. The title got wet when I tried selling the car during a rainstorm. Apparently, even a little bit of water can activate a watermark intended to stop title thieves. Our local DMVs wouldn’t even touch it. Thankfully, I can order a duplicate title for $75 so it’s not the biggest deal, but turnaround time is a month unless I pay at least double for overnight processing and shipping… just so we can pay the DMV again to transfer it.

Luckily for Sheryl, I had another car that she wanted even more than the Volkswagen. The 2001 BMW 525iT wagon that I bought from the Bishop was her favorite car in my fleet and one that she admits drives way better than one of her dream cars, an Oldsmobile LSS.

Transferring that car was equally stupid hard because the car was technically last owned by a person currently without the capacity to handle a vehicle sale, and Illinois doesn’t like that. After getting the runaround from three more DMVs, Sheryl pulled her literal lawyer card and finally, one of them put the title transfer through.

She’s over the moon with her new to her BMW and we’ve even taken it on a day trip already. Of course, this left me without a BMW wagon, but the timing was perfect because the Bishop was ready to sell me his next BMW.

My New-To-Me 2007 BMW 530xi

On Friday night, I made my way over to Bishop’s place where a frankly amazing buy was waiting for me. This E61 530xi wagon is so clean that its paint shines like a mirror. Paint swirls? Basically none. Rust? There’s a bubble about half of the size of a dime on the tailgate, that’s it!

The interior is much of the same. There isn’t a tear in the leather or a stain to be found. All of the buttons are intact and the headliner continues to work against gravity. Had you asked me to guess this car’s mileage, I would have said something like 80,000 miles. But no, this car rocks 178,000 miles on the odometer.

[Editor’s Note: Holy crap how did I forget about the E61. Is the world sleeping on this car? It looks fantastic! -DT]. 

A Little Bit On The E60

Before we continue, I should talk about this car’s roots. Before the E60 and E61 there was the E39. That car has a timeless design that remains celebrated by enthusiasts today.

The E60? Well, when BMW released it into the world in 2003 the vehicle’s design caused an upset that rippled across the bow of the automotive universe. The E39 was understated and conservative. This? The E60 was curvaceous and featured BMW design-head Chris Bangle’s characteristic voluptuous rear end.

Under the direction of Bangle, the E60 was designed by Boyke Boyer and Davide Arcangeli. The latter designer was a transplant from Pininfarina, where he worked on the Peugeot 406. Arcangeli reportedly finished the E60’s design in 2000, and BMW brass gave it the green light. This apparently came after weeks of difficulty in trying to get the E60’s complex design into a clay model. But Arcangeli succeeded and his baby was set to become the new model.

Sadly, Arcangeli wouldn’t get to see his car hit the road. He passed away later that year in 2000. As BMW Blog notes, Arcangeli’s death motivated Bangle and the rest of the design team to honor their lost friend by pushing the design into production without changing anything. Not that Bangle felt that anything needed to be changed, from BMW Blog:

“Davide’s approach to the project was, I think very unique” Bangle told us during a recent interview. “BMW’s design team was tasked with creating a car with a huge amount of mass, on top of wheels that were the same size as before.”

“[Arcangeli’s] idea behind it was, ‘we really play up the idea of negative surfaces’ which had been, up until that time, considered a taboo”. Bangle said. “[The idea was to] use the negative surfaces instead of lines, to give you a different idea of what the vehicle is”.

“When a designer is lost at that stage in the project,” said Bangle “it can be, and it was in that case, that everyone on the team felt extremely dedicated to his memory and that meant ‘don’t change anything’”.

When you see an E60, whether you love it or are repulsed, you’re not really looking at a vehicle designed by committee (as much as you may have initially thought so), but rather one man’s vision.

Under The Hood

The E60 was also a technological leap forward. Up front is a cast aluminum structure while the rest of the car is steel. Apparently, this makes the E60 up to 165 pounds lighter than an E39 (depending on configuration) and maintains a near 50/50 weight distribution. The weight loss apparently doesn’t apply to the 530i, which Car and Driver say weighs 110 pounds more than the outgoing car.

Engines start with a 2.5-liter straight six making 184 HP and 175 lb-ft torque (the same in my wife’s E39) and race all the way up the M5’s 5.0-liter V10. The E60 is notable for having the first and only M5 to come with a V10. My car has a 3.0-liter straight six making 255 HP and 220 lb-ft torque.

So Much Technology

In terms of suspension, the standard gear gives you struts up front and a multi-link setup in the rear. There’s some trickery going on as well. BMW introduced Active Steering with the E60. This consists of a computer-controlled variable-ratio planetary gearbox between the steering wheel and the rack and pinion. At low speeds, the steering is quick with a ratio around 1:10. Lock to lock, you’re looking at about 1.7 turns. At speed, the ratio is a nice and slow 1:20, or roughly 5 turns if you somehow managed to achieve that at highway speed.

This steering system is combined with an active roll stabilization system. As Car and Driver explain, in this system, the anti-roll bars can effectively disconnect during straight-line driving for comfort. Then, when you throw it into a corner, the anti-roll bars reconnect, providing stiffness. In practice, the magazine found that it held around a skidpad better than an E39, better than a Mercedes E320, and nearly as good as a Porsche Boxster. Car and Driver’s tester hit 60 mph in 6.7 seconds, about the same speed as the outgoing car.

My 530xi also sports xDrive all-wheel-drive. In this system, 60 percent of power normally goes to the rear with 40 percent reaching the front. The vehicle’s computer can change distribution depending on slip. Still no manual transmission this time around, but this one does have a silky-smooth automatic. No SMG transmission here!

The tech continues inside, where the E60 has BMW’s infamous iDrive system. This was my first time using iDrive and at first, it was baffling. I saw that my HVAC system has knobs for temperature and fan speed, but no settings for which vents send the heat. I also saw no way to change radio stations.

Well, all of those settings and more are in iDrive. You can set just how your vents work, how your lights work, how your heated seats work, and more in the system. Navigation with iDrive reminds me of Mazda’s current infotainment system. I like how you can operate the system while resting your arm on the armrest, but I’d rather just have real buttons.

In addition to those systems, there’s even more. This car has adaptive headlights, distance sensors, a head up display, a motorized cargo blind, and night vision. Yes, night vision! Sadly, the night vision is one of the features that doesn’t work on my car.

The motorized tailgate is also a little wonky. Sometimes it’ll open an inch then slam shut and other times it’ll lift all the way open then bonk you on the head.

This is one of the things that Bishop’s mechanic couldn’t fix. Apparently, the mechanic told him to just stop dumping money into the car.

In Love Again

Now those problems are my problems! Honestly, I’m entertained by the homicidal tailgate, so it’s staying broken. I might fix the night vision just to see how it works. There’s also an intermittent check engine light for an EVAP problem.

Aside from those little things, the car is basically perfect. I’m just floored by how good this car and how much car I got for the price. The Bishop takes such good care of his cars that both the E39 and this E61 both came with service records about an inch thick.

I haven’t had a ton of seat time in this car yet, but I love what I’ve experienced thus far. A lot of what makes the E39 great is present here. The steering is communicative and the throttle is just as sharp. And it grips the road better than you’d expect a plush wagon to.

I do think that the E39 is a little tauter and it’s hard to ignore its good looks, but the E61 is such a soothing drive. I haven’t even discovered all the ways the seats can be transformed, but they have a sort of neck pillow thing like you’d use while flying. I feel like on even the worst day I could just fire up the Harmon Kardon surround sound, point the car in a direction, and let the day melt away.

This car, despite the mileage, is in even better condition than Sheryl’s E39. The only place I could find any rust was on a somewhat hidden place on the tailgate, and as I said before, it’s so small and so early on that it could be fixed in no time.

This rolling laptop of a car will become my main daily driver. I feel like I can eat up a cross-country trip’s worth of miles without wearing myself out.

I think this is my best cheap car yet. Sure, toys like my imported JDM cars are fantastic, but they aren’t really more than weekend cars. My cheap Smarts and Volkswagens are also great, but they don’t hold a candle to this. This is another one I’d recommend to someone looking for a lot of bang for their buck. You may not pay $3,000 as I did, but I’m sure it’ll put a smile on your face.

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