Quote:
Originally Posted by Patton250
It’s interesting that BMW would allow a design flaw like this to continue for so many years and not offer some type of protection for it themselves. Of the thousands of miles I drive every year upwards of 50,000 miles a year I run over crap all the time that hits the bottom of the car. I mean it’s not an every day occurrence, but I would say once every 4000 miles. Now all I need is to hit the right thing and have it hit that spot and at the very least it’s going to bend some stuff on it.
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I forgot about this until reading some of the subsequent posts on this topic. On my previous M5, I was driving down a terrible road typical of the area I live in. A chunk of the broken street about 6 inches tall by 8 inches long, by 6 inches wide had come out of the street and was resting on the road surface. I inadvertently drove over it, and it got lodged between the car’s underliner (the one that feels like fiberglass material but more rigid/harder) and the road. I dragged it briefly, and it cut a decent hole in the liner with its jagged edges and ripped it downward. I ended up having to cut away an 18 inch by 18 inch portion of the liner on the passenger side about one third of the way down the length of the car from the front because it was dragging against the ground. I looked into having it replaced, but the dealership wanted the replace the whole liner and charge me for labor accordingly. It was around $1000. I declined and drove the car that way for a couple of years before trading it for my current M5.
If I had hit the oil cooler instead, or had the piece of road get lodged underneath it, I likely would have suffered the exact occurrence these products seem to be designed to prevent. The impact and subsequent damage were so bad that if it had happened to my oil cooler, it is likely that all of the car’s oil would’ve been drained within one minute.
If you think you may hit something to this degree/frequency as your post states, this might be a great investment for you. It seems that cost is not an object as you’ve been building and modifying your car to your exact desired specifications, so going a little further with a little extra protection probably makes sense for you in my opinion.