As we head towards the month of October, it signals yet another six-month renewal on the M2’s insurance. Good news for me: for the first time in three consecutive renewals, the price to insure the car did not go up. I mean, I would certainly hope so! The BMW’s rate is already at a staggering $236 per month. (Non-married 37-year-old male living in San Francisco, with enough coverage to shield me from any financial risk.) This, for a car I seldomly drive.
And I can tell you exactly how much I drove last year. September is the month the M2 is due for its annual service. Comparing the work order from this year to the last, the BMW has traveled a grand total of 6,107 miles. That seems like a lot to me, but that’s half of what the average American drives per year. Fact of the matter is, this M2 sits too damn much for me to be paying that high of insurance cost.
What is it about BMWs that makes them more harmful to other drivers (liability) and costing more to fix (collision)?
For shits and giggles, sometimes I would plug in another car into Progressive’s premium calculator. Just to see how the other side live. I can buy a brand-new Toyota 4Runner for more money than I can sell the M2 for, and insurance cost would still drop to about $140 a month. Tempting, isn’t it? Almost anything that isn’t in the same high performance sports car category as the M2 will see a drop in insurance. The only exception is Tesla cars. They may be plenty on the road, but apparently it’s very expensive to fix, if crashed.
Speaking of annual service, what if I told you the M2 is the most reliable car I’ve owned thus far? It’s the only car I’ve bought with my own money that nothing out of schedule has gone wrong with it. My first purchase - a 2013 Subaru WRX STI - suffered a high-pressure fuel pump failure. Second purchase - a 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata - had a rattling convertible top. Third purchase - a 2015 Porsche 911 GT3 - dealt with a broken fan blower motor. Fourth purchase - 2021 BMW M2 - has been flawless over the past five years.
Perhaps the ill reliability reputation of BMW cars needs an asterisk to go along with it. No doubt the German brand calls for more than the simple oil change on its maintenance schedule. Would you want to spend $1,200 to change out the M2’s spart plugs every three years? The rear differential oil needs changing every three years, too. Use the brakes too much, and you’d be staring at multiple thousand dollars bill for a new set of pads and rotors.
What I am surmising here is that BMW cars become unreliable because owners don’t perform all of the called-for maintenance items. Once the initial three years free maintenance plan runs out, the sticker shock from year four onwards can be challenging. When it goes from free to suddenly high hundreds to low thousand dollars, I can understand why a non-insignificant number of owners only tick the oil change box and nothing else.
Unlike a Toyota truck, these German cars cannot mechanically survive unscathed on oil changes alone. You cannot treat the maintenance schedule as mere suggestions. N of one to be sure, but I made sure the M2 was done by the book, to the letter, over the five years of ownership. No surprise that the car has yet to let me down mechanically.
Easy for me to say, of course: the first three years of maintenance was free. The following two was a heavily subsidized $899 combined. Under a thousand dollars of total maintenance cost for five years is nearly a bargain, considering the badge adorning the bonnet. I can be smug about getting all the work done to the M2 because it really hasn’t cost me that much money.
Unfortunately, the gravy train is over. Starting next September, I will be responsible for the full servicing cost. That will include replacing the six spark plugs. I would love to work on the car myself, but I haven’t the tools nor the space to do so. I can probably hack it with changing the engine oil, but service items like the rear differential? No freaking way.
The double whammy of continuously high insurance cost and the forthcoming maintenance cost have converged on a conclusion: I can’t afford to keep the M2. I mean, I can afford to, but I don’t want to afford it, if that makes any sense. It’s kind of like the person who buys a treadmill thinking he’s going to have the running schedule of a world championship marathoner, only for the equipment to sit and collect dust. It’s time to be honest with myself.
The BMW simply sits too damn much for the amount of money I’m paying to keep it around. The romantic ideal of many road trips to interesting locales hasn’t materialize one bit over the years (the pandemic is no longer an excuse). I don’t even take the M2 to the local mountain roads anymore, greatly preferring to stay quietly at home on Saturday and Sunday mornings. And that’s okay! As we enter difference stages of life, what we like and how we prefer to spend our time definitely changes.
Ideals are too expensive. Reality is where you must make choices to support what you want to do. As much as I (thought I) want to, I can’t bring myself to overly commit financially towards cars anymore. At any time this year I could have walked into a Honda dealership and paid good money for a Civic Type R. And yet here I am still with just a single car. Perhaps I need to borrow some of those purported Gen Z YOLO spending habits.
A friend recently remarked to me, after learning how much I am paying in insurance: “Why don’t you sell it?” That was all the impetus it took for me to take action. I checked what CarMax will give me for the BMW. It was a satisfactory price. The very next day, keys were exchanged at the local branch, and a check was deposited into my checking account. Done deal. Sold.
The M2 Competition was a forever car candidate. Financials aside, there were no other qualms about it being the last internal combustion car I ever buy. It’s the right amount of sports car, with right amount of power and handling, and the right amount of utility. It really could have been a contender.
For the current me and how I would like to allocate my money, it’s time to downsize on the fun and upsize on the utility. The replacement car will still have an enthusiastic bent, but it will be better on fuel, can ferry more passengers, cheaper to maintenance, and most importantly, significantly less expensive to insure.
Another chapter is closed. I’m very happy it was written.
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Date acquired: October 2020
Total mileage: 22,669
Mileage this month: 207
Costs this month: $62.36
MPG this month: 19.47