320d 2.0 xDrive Luxury 5dr Estate

Transmission not fit for purpose

Having owned the car from new, after 70k miles it started hesitating on acceleration. My local garage spend days trying to diagnose the fault, decided that the injectors were at fault, replaced them, and found the problem persisted.

A few days later the car broke down, with no drive at all.

A transmission specialist diagnosed a broken transfer case. When they fitted a new unit the front wheels locked up and were unable to get it working, and returned the car to me as a 2 wheel drive with no ABS or stability control.

BMW have estimated £6k to fix it. The car is not worth much more than that - it’s more cost effective to sell it for parts.

In summary, Xdrive seems rather fragile, expensive and unmaintainable by non BMW dealers. I’ve heard that the transfer case will ‘give up’ if the tyre tread is more than 2mm différent between any of the wheels. If this is so how can BMW continue to sell such a flawed system?

I’ll not be buying another BMW, and I’d suggest you don’t either.

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