Faults:

A lot of preventative maintenance, thankfully mostly taken care of by previous owners. Myself I bought it used in 2017 and it has been my weekend/summer fun car. It gets serviced on time and everything it needs. No major issues, but be aware these are expensive cars to run and very expensive if anything serious goes wrong.

General Comments:

Cannot believe this car is 18 years old. Stunning looking coupe that still looks fresh in my opinion. Blue metallic.

Expensive to tax at £330 per year, and it only does 34 mpg.

Lovely interior, beige leather, and all electrics.

Not over the top fast, but goes quickly when you need to move; even the automatic box on this car feels sharp, actually prefer it to manual, suits this car's lazy cruiser feel.

If only it was cheaper to run I'd drive it everyday! But no it is a lovely investment, these cars will only hold value at this age now, perhaps even go up slightly in years to come for well kept low mileage looked after cars. BMW were at the top of their game in the early 2000's with the 3 series.

Faults:

Plastic guide on top of timing chain split and had to be replaced along with a new tensioner. OEM tensioner is rubbish, causes the chain to slacken, which in turn breaks the plastic guides. Mine was not rattly or making any noise, but thankfully the garage spotted it at service. It's a given with this engine.

Rear brake pipes rust and can cause MOT failure - seems to affect all older BMW cars. It's expensive and awkward to fix. Brake vacuum seal had to be replaced.

Bushings on the front wishbones had to be replaced and the car tracking corrected.

General Comments:

Well engineered, good quality interior. Handling is great and it's an involving and fun car to drive. Front seats are very comfortable. Quite good on fuel - 38 MPG on a run, 28 around town. It's a pity there are so many issues resulting from bad engineering.

Faults:

Nothing has gone wrong.

General Comments:

The all new E90 3 series. I think BMW has now become a mass car developer who has lost the edge a little with this car. The car has serious performance issues as it is just not powerful enough for a 2.0l engine. The interior has dropped in standard ie, the quality and the feel has gone out of the window and is more of a Nissan primera feel to it. Of course the more you pay the better it gets, but the cars are no longer something to benchmark exceptional quality against. After a while you begin to notice the drop in standard and the feel good factor of the car soon wears off unless you have gone up from a standard car to the BM.