Mr.Bavarian

I drive in Sports Mode, often reving past 5000 RPM as a daily driver. Currently at 39K miles.
How long should this fun last before the engine finally bites the dust - taking into consideration
occasionally servicing (air filters etc) as required.

Car is 2004 530i. Should I cut back on the aggressiveness as it wasn't designed to be a sports car.

D33ZNUT5

Give er man. These cars are made to be driven hard.

Phantom Mark

I have often wondered this myself, the MAX RPM is quoted as being the MAXIMUM continuous RPM, thus one could assume you should once warm be able to rev the engine to those Max RPM's indefinately ? In real life I doubt very much this is the case however.

Use your discretion mate, you know if your thrashing the car or not, a spirited drive every now and then wont hurt, but IMHO at least constant abuse will lead to problems eventually, I would suspect gearbox problems likely to come before engine problems btw

545OH

I tried to baby my car when I decided to buy it after a lease but found the car progressively drove worse. Not as crisp, more vibration at idle, less acceleration and engine was less smooth. After a few days of driving hard again ,like I did for every mile before it ran great!

I notice this when I have a non-bmw or rental. I drive the crap out of it and park in my garage and the engine smells like it is melting or burning. When I drive my bimmer hard, the engine seems to love it and has no trace of any burning or any problem. As long as you stick with frequent oil changes too. Do not go by the 20k recomendation if you drive hard consistently. You want to keep all those moving parts highly lubed up if you are driving hard frequently. Running top tier gas, high synthetic oil and doing regular and preventative maintence I see no harm at all. You can go easy on your tranny though and not downshift at too high of an RPM but other than that these cars were made to see 7k rpms. Remember bmw puts 7k as the max because the engine could easily do a lot more than that, but they pruprosely set it lower and design hp to peak out before that so there is not need to go higher however the parts of the engine would hold up to much higher speeds.

I have 42k and not a problem with my car engines or tranny

amit1947

Thats funny, I was kind of wondering the same thing this morning as I was driving to work. I switched to sport mode as I came off my exit and drove a little aggressive. Sport (DS) mode really does change the personality of the car. It feel like you get a lot more power to play with at the cost of abrupt shifts. Does DS mode ONLY change the shift program or is there something else going on?

Its like that tv show from the 80s, Knight Rider with that super duper extra cool turbo jet mode or whatever K.I.T. switches into when the need arises.

DD_545i

These are BMWs - engineered for speed. They're designed for cruising at high speed up and down the Autobahns all day long. I've driven my various BMWs at over 140mph for hours and hours and they love it. Same applies to Mercedes and Audi, but I think BMW drivers tend to drive a bit more aggressively so i's engineered into the car.

The only time you want to avoid revving past 5000 rpm is when it's still cold (as indicated by the dotted lines on the rev-counter). Keep on driving it sportily and you and the car will continue enjoying it well past 100K miles.

Krozi

I have heard from many mechanics that every once in a while you should push your engine a little.
Not sure why but I think the extra pressure just helps clean out the engine.

Phantom Mark

It cleans out the Carbon deposits thats why, also if you just tootle around like a poof all the time the plugs on petrol cars can get dirty for example

DD_545i

Krozi

Yea, I think that's why city driven cars require a lot more maintenance.