Bow Wow <Bow@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>I was planning on taking my soon to take possession X5 on a trip which
>will consist mostly of highway driving of about 3000mile drive and
>been told that that's not such a good idea because you don't want to
>drive a brand new car on the highway for any extended amount if you
>can help before the car's properly broken in.
Well, sort of. For the break-in period, you should vary your speed a good
bit. Don't just drop the cruise control on and go to sleep. And you
should not exceed 90 mph or so.
On most US highways, following these two rules is not difficult.
Also, in spite of what BMW claims, you should probably do an early
oil change maybe 1500 miles in. This means finding a place to do
an oil change halfway along your trip. Or picking up oil and a filter
at the dealer when you buy the car and doing it on the curb in the hotel
parking lot.
>The seals, rings and the machine just needs to set in properly, which
>happens during the break in period and before that, I was told you
>should avoid any long highway trip.
This is true, but you should know that modern engines are machined pretty
precisely and don't need the elaborate break-in that was needed in the
sixties and the seventies. You used to keep below 50 mph, vary your speed
all over to get the rings to seat, and change your oil at 500 miles (and
you would see LOTS of metal shavings in that first oil change). Engines
aren't like that any more.
But you DO need to treat your engine extra careful in the break-in period,
and that means no jackrabbit starts, no racing the engine, no high speed
driving. The good news is that "high speed" on a BMW product is a lot
higher than you can legally drive in the US anyway. And you do still need
to vary your speed to seat the rings, but it's not as elaborate a
procedure
as it was years ago.
>What do you guys think? If this was your car, would you do it or put
>off the trip until after the car's broken in properly? Thanks.
I'd take the trip, but I'd take it along the black roads on the map as
much as possible and take my time about the whole thing. But then, I
like to do that anyway... I drove from Richmond to New York on Route 1
last year and it had a lot of stoplights but it was lots of fun to see
the remnants of the old road city from the fifties. And I was driving
a BMW whose engine was broken in around 420,000 miles ago.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
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