Quote:
Originally Posted by Ammonia
The Plot Thickens
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First off, +++1 to this commenter! You brightened up my day!
I dropped off the car in the morning explaning the overheating problem to my SA. I said I find it disappointing that the car breaks down just 3 days after an oil change and I hope its not related. My SA got super defensive at that point and said something to the effect that its unfair for me to blame the technitians without there being a proper analysis done on the car. So I said, sounds fair lets get the analysis part under way. When can it start? So after a long drawnout discussion of how they can give me a rental, but can't cut the other cars and put mine infront to speed up their quote of 45min to 1hr to just take the car in, I remided my SA that as far as I am concerned the service from saturday is incomplete so my car better find its way at the front of the queue instead of waiting on all these folk that arrived today, but werent there on saturday... I also told him I will not be taking a rental and instead be sticking around and checking regularly on the status updates of this follow up service. Somehow that worked because when they drove the car off the staging area they didn't just park it out back, it actually went straight into the service.
About 35min later upon inquiring as to the status I was handed a copy of readouts from the car, with the relevant section in the pictures area at the end. Basically the Water Pump stopped due to blockage (at least thats how the car reports it). I joked with my SA by asking whether any surgical gloves or a scalpel was forgotten in there during the operation, but he didn't seem to be in a joking mood - go figure.
The fix was to replace the pump. They had the part in stock and I was told 2.5hrs for the labor, so I figured I'll stop bugging them and booked it out of there with a rental.
When I picked up my car I looked it over - they had cleaned out the engine bay decently from all the spilled fluid and as far as I could tell the everything in there looked just as I remember it, so couldn't really tell there was some major component swapped out. I drove the car a bunch in the surrounding area (basically hop on the freeway, exit, city streets back to freeway) for a couple rounds watching the temp. It climbed slightly over half which is unusual (compared to before) as I wouldn't consider what I was doing particularly hard driving, but no warning lights or boiling fluids so I left. My SA wasn't in when I picked up the car, so I asked another if he could give me extra details about the repair. I was told that the dealer technitians do not take components apart to diagnose what broke them and instead they ship them to BMW directly so that it can diagnose and improve the parts. How true that is I have no idea.
Later on I e-mailed my SA with basically the same question, phrased politely, seeking more information about what was broken with the water pump and if it had any overlap with the oil change... The e-mail I got back said exactly "It is an electric motor and it just failed". Yeah right, total BS. The e-mail didn't even follow basic Hi X, body, signature, Y... Just body. Fine not a big deal, I am used to receiving e-mails from 15 year olds.
Later on at night I got a chance to pull off the footage from the service. It was the same technitian that did the oil change on sat, that was also doing this service. Couldn't really tell anything during the actual pump swap from the footage as it was all done under the car, but it is very clear that the liquid used this time around came from actual gray coolant bottles (4 to be precise) and it is a blue-ish liquid just as one would expect it to be. That "water" hose was not touched at all during today's service.
Other interesting stuff from the footage, is the tech guy doing the test drive. I always turn off any music in the car when I drop it off for service, but he turned it on, browsed through the songs on the USB I had plugged in there, even commented on my music taste, until he found a song that he apparently liked, turned it up and drove the car in the way you'd imagine any joyrider to do so. At least he thanked my radar detector when it beeped with enough advance warning for him to slow down and not blow the doors of the cop car on the other side of the intersection he was approaching. Not exactly a top-notch handling of customer's property, but I am not going to raise a stink about that.
So bottom line... Did they put tap water in the coolant reservoir instead of the BMW 50/50 solution with distilled water? Yeah I am pretty damn sure they did so. Is that what caused the water pump failure? No clue and no way to prove it without access to replaced parts. From what I have read, tap water could strip the inner coating of whatever it is flowing through due to its ionization properties and the high pressure of the system. Thats why the actual solution to pour in there is a 50/50 mix of coolant with
distilled water, not tap water. Whats the likelyhood that the system was going to fail anyway without the oil change? I would guess it would have worked correctly just fine, but again no way to prove that.
If the fix from today works fine over the next couple days I will just drop the issue altogether (but the footage is definitely a keeper from both those services). Ultimately I just want the car to work so that I am not regretting the burning hole in my pocket from buying it.