Hello.
I have a 2006 330i with 65k on it.
i got the car about 5 months ago. back in february one day early morning when I was driving the car to the air port, the "Engine Overheated. Stop The Car" massage came up on console monitor.
I freaked out and pulled over immediately. i stopped by a mechanic shop and told them what happened and they thought maybe I was low on coolant. so we checked the coolant and it was full.
so I waited about 10 minutes and start driving it again. everything seemed to be back to normal. I never seen the error again until recently about 3 weeks ago.
same thing happened and it gave me the message but the coolant was full but this time message kept coming back every 2-3 days. my coolant was full. I never seen the smoke or steam coming from under the hood or lose of performance or any unusual behavior such as shaking. so I though maybe I should take the car to the dealer.
i go to dealer and the guy checks the key on the computer and tells me the key does not mentions anything about overheating and in fact there is no error on the computer.
he asked me to leave the car for diagnosis. after a couple of days I get the call from him telling me that the car has a cracked head cover gasket, water pump is broken and the thermostat is out. apparently water pump went out and cause the problem for thermostat and head cover gasket.
the guy takes care of my cars on the side usually. so he told me the dealer cost to fix it is $2800 but he will take care of it for $1500. fix the cover head gasket, replace the water pump and replace the thermostat.
so I want to know based on the condition that I described, do you think I had the problems he is telling me?
the thing is not even the check engine light was on. I even drove the car without over heating with my A/C on to the dealership. Houston is pretty hot city so you can imaging how hot it could've been out there. yet I did not encounter any problem. a friend of mine told me that it could be a computer problem and needs to be reprogrammed. what do you guys think?

I think that if you have an N52 engine (which you should in a 2006 330), then you should research the lifter issues. I think the lifters are all pre-assembled with the head cover and can be replaced under good will, as there is an SIB for it. As a matter of fact, there have been reports of people getting new covers based on this SIB at 100k+ miles.

Sorry I couldn't help more, but I don't want to speculate - just told you what I know for sure.

Good Luck! And keep us in the loop on what happens.

I don't see how you could possibly drive for more than a few minutes if even that with that kind of issue. You car would overheat within minutes. So I don't think that is the issue. Get a second opinion. Broken water pump alone means death to an engine if driven. No way you had all those issues and was able to drive around like that.

A blown head gasket is pretty rare! and if you aren't loosing coolant then the whole diagnosis sounds a bit strange!

Fight fight fight! Call BMW NA.

you mean head gasket, and not head cover? right? usually if you have a bad head gasket, you lose coolant, or sometimes oil enters the cooling system.

it could just be as simple as a bad temp sensor, thinking the car is overheating. bad water pumps usually leak water, unless the propellor broke inside, which is rare.

Most of the times it just the thermostat or the coolant sensor on the thermostat giving trouble. If the head gasket was blown, trust me you'd never be able to drive it. The diagnostics is BS... Just tryna jerk ya.
GL

ive blown a head gasket before and trust me, youll know when you do...the smoke coming from everywhere and the huge puddle of coolant is a dead giveaway. :)
maybe its a bad radiator?
start with the cheapest fix first; the thermostat or temp sensor.

good luck and keep us posted

Ask the mechanic how he determined that you have a bad head gasket. If he says he ran a compression leak test on all of the cylinders and at least one failed then its possible the head gasket is partly at fault. If he doesn't mention this I'd get a second opinion.

IF YOU REALLY TRUST this place, then $1,500 bucks isn't a bad price for the job. Just make sure the price specifically includes REPLACING the head gasket, not FIXING it.

Hope everything works out.

I've gone through many headgaskets in other cars and they all fail differently. Sometimes they puff out huge clouds of white smoke, sometimes it's blue smoke, and other times it just pushes coolant with no smoke at all. I've never had one go that didn't either smoke, lose/push coolant, or mix oil & water. All of which is pretty easy to see.

Autozone rents a tool called a 'block tester' to test for a blown headgasket. You put the tester fluid (blue) into the tube and put it over your expansion tank, radiator cap, etc. when the car is warm and running and squeeze the ball at the top so that it draws air from your cooling system into the fluid. If it turns yellow, you have hydrocarbons in your exhaust and have a cracked head/block/headgasket. If not, usually you are ok. Its like $30 to buy, or you can rent it for free.

That said, if you aren't loosing coolant, blowing hoses, or cracking the plastic cooling components, you likely just have a thermostat/water pump issue. If you really do have a blown headgasket, $2,800 is a very low price for a dealer to repair. $1,500 is a crazy low price.

Try having him replace the thermostat & water pump and go from there. Those are cheap.