[drwillb]

On Tuesday, half a mile from work, my yellow coolant temperature warning came on. Being "almost there", I continued slowly to my office building and the red death temperature warning came on.

Sidenote: why on earth is there no possible way of displaying the coolant temp on these cars, even with iDrive. All we have is the high-tech equivalent of an idiot light from the '70s.

Lunchtime rolls around and I went out to check on the car. Overflow tank low, added 8 oz. of distilled water to get the level back to normal.

Evening time comes and I drive home uneventfully. I had some time to think about things and checked on n54tech for JB4 settings. Sure enough, steering wheel menu 7, item 6 hijacks the oil temp gauge to read coolant temp. This is good but the scale on the dash gauge doesn't make interpreting temperature easy. I then turned on the iPhone app for JB4 and, lucky me, the oil temp gauge on the app reads the hijacked dash gauge data, not the actual canbus data for oil temp. Therefore, JB4 iPhone app oil temp gauge was reading coolant temp with an analog value!!

Wednesday morning comes, I drop my son off at school, then have to go down Main St. with lights and traffic. iPhone app shows rising coolant temps and I finally pull over when it hits 215 F. At this point, the main fan is running at monsoon speed, which I've never heard before, other than on the prior morning's overheat condition. Prestige BMW, Ramsey, NJ is one mile away at this point so I called and took the car right in. I got my loaner, went to my scheduled meeting and left the dealer with what I thought was a pretty cut and dry situation. Especially when you consider my car has 60k miles on the original water pump.

Thursday afternoon now. I return the call from my service advisor to hear that the tech plugged in their diagnostic computer and didn't pull any codes or faults. In today's BMW world that seems to mean the techs behind the curtain have no fucking idea what to do because these guys are only trained to read what the computer monitor spits out at them. Today's mechanics have no diagnostic skills. I thought this was only happening in medicine.

The service advisor said they could go ahead and replace the water pump and thermostat, as per my request, if I wanted, but the "almighty" computer didn't think they were a problem. I asked how much: $1800. I had to hold back from actually saying F YOU. Seems the parts are $900 bucks and the labor is a whopping 6 hours. Now, initial reaction would not have been without merit if you consider that I had done some homework on Tuesday evening. $600 will buy you all the parts from either ECS or Turner, and that's for a VDO pump. I also looked at the BavAuto video for the job and my mental calculation came out to somewhere between 2 to 3 hours for the entire job, including getting the car off the ground and taking the bottom shield off. So, $1800.....F YOU.

On top of all this, I asked if anyone had taken the car out on the road. Something with traffic lights and traffic would seems appropriate. The answer was: the tech let the car idle for a long time. Everybody, join in: F YOU!!

I turned in my loaner tonight and brought the car home. Temps were around 206 F all the way home but that's mostly highway. I then sat in the car in my driveway and the temp had climbed to 217 F and the fan was right back at monsoon speed. BTW, ambient temp was below 50 F.

So, my car guy senses still tell me the water pump is well on its way to puking its guts out.

Does anyone have any other opionions on this?

Thanks.