Quote:
Originally Posted by mackeroni
I have surpassed 55,000 miles on my 2011 135i. So I am now officially in dangerous territory when it comes to my electric water pump. At least, that is the way I have been thinking for the last four years. Look at Dackel's survey, for crying out loud! I have been reading about failure after failure with little or no warning since 2013.
Last week, I called my local dealer to schedule my airbag replacement (finally!) and told the service writer, who I have known and trusted for several years, that I would also like a quote for water pump and thermostat replacement. He sounded surprised and asked what was wrong with my water pump. I reported that members of this forum have been posting a large number of failures in a bell-shaped curve with about 60,000 miles at the apex. He spent the next ten minutes talking me out of a pre-emptive replacement, explaining that we might have a couple hundred failures reported on our forum, but that they have not replaced even five percent of the water pumps in all the hundreds of cars with N54 or N55 engines that they have sold in the last seven or eight years.
He convinced me to wait until it fails. His logic seems sound. If 95% are NOT failing, why should I spend $900 needlessly. If the number of failures was truly high, there would already be a recall. So, I am going to wait...and try not to panic when I get more than an hour from home. That will be the hard part.
So, what do you think? Are we all doomed to an early water pump failure, or has our judgement been clouded by focusing only on the number of failures and not the number of pumps that just keep going?
Peace... Mack
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I agree with him. There's no point in replacing it preemptively. Is it more likely to fail at 60ishK miles? Sure. Does that mean it definitely will? No. Don't spend money fixing things that aren't broken.