Looking at Solstice's thread on buying a sub $10k car made me think of Bella's 323i... and since we've had it for over a year now I realized I never posted an update on it. So far the car has been reliable for her and trouble free. She has enjoyed how it drives and the comfort level of it. It's shod with the X-ice 3's for the winter now & being RWD only it's getting her around with ease still, we added a 40lb bag of sand to the trunk last winter and it helped get some more weight over the rear wheels & made a difference. I take it for a rip once in a while & just love how solid & put together the car feels, it's just gotta cohesive feeling about it. She has put just over 20k kms on it as of right now and is quite happy with it.
So far the maintenance items on it have been as follows:
- changing the plugs (which should have been done much earlier because they were worn out badly, the gap was huge on them causing extra strain on the coils, so much so that it had a misfire on cylinder #2) and the coils, which I did for ~$270 (Rockauto) in parts & shipping. Did this in July.
- oil change done at home, ~$90 in parts, done in September.
- rear pads & rotors, and front pads, ~$235 in parts & shipping from Rockauto. Put on Zimmerman coated rotors and Bosch pads, done in November.
- changing out the coolant (computer was asking for this service & I figured it's better to get it done as preventative maintenance), done by my indy ~$230, done in December.
Non-maintenance items have been as follows:
- exhaust leak on the connection between the downpipe & the cat, done at Speedy for ~$330 (which I thought was pretty good considering they had to source the parts from BMW and that was $160 alone). Done in November.
So aside from the exhaust issue, the rest of the items were maintenance on wear & tear items. Total cost is ~$1155 and now she should be good for another 3 - 4 years on the maintenance side. The winter tires have at least one more winter in them & the summers should be good for 3 more. Not quite the FGC story that gets ragged on here
![Grin ;D](https://www.autos.ca/forum/Smileys/CarTalk/grin.gif)