The problem with some of the early make 95's was that a lot of them seem to be running at higher compression. With this knowledge there are a lot of things you can do to prevent your car from getting all fux0red. You could also just look for a 95 with a later date on it. I think most of the cars that were running into these problems were made in late 94 and the first 3 months of 95. Personally, when I start looking for MY 95, I'll take what I find. If the compression is a bit higher I'll just have to be a bit more cautious with timing and whatnot. Not too big of a deal in my opinion.

Now the 97-99's had some pretty horrible transmission issues which have never been officialy recalled, so you can wind up with a bad tranny that won't be replaced under warranty. I'd say thats more of a problem to look out for, but that's also cuz I'm too scared to work on my own tranny so I wouldn't be able to fix it myself.

I don't remember if 95's had this or not, but some of the E36 M3's were shipped with plastic pieces in the water pump and were known to fail, so have a look at that. There's a few other little issues but they were a lot less frequent so I wouldn't worry much.

Awesome cars... I want one so bad, but I don't want to deal with the hit I'd take from selling my WRX right now. Maybe in a year or two... Shoot, in a year or two the 95's will be cheap enough to own as a second car.

-Alan

 

Welp, I'm not Zoeb or anything... Heh But check out roadfly.org

They have a lot of good info there, in spite of the horrid looking message board. Somebody needs to flick their rich asses a quarter so they can upgrade to this format.

Another one with lots of bimmers for sale is bimmerforums.com

There a 2 other ones that I used to know of but they didn't get much traffic so I don't go to them often and don't remember where they were.

Also check autotrader.com of course.

-Alan