This 'Brand New' BMW E30 3-Series Might Not Be The Awesome Buy It Appears To Be

From time to time a delivery mileage classic pops up and the internet cheers gleefully in unison, but bear in mind it might have been sat still for decades with its internals festering away... buyer beware

Darren Cassey

12 Aug 2015

The words ‘brand new BMW E30’ are mighty appealing. When I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter on my way to work this morning, I came across a tweet with those exact words. Naturally, my interest was piqued, and I followed the link to see how glorious such a machine - in this case a 323i - might look.

I wasn’t disappointed. The paintwork is mint, and the engine bay, un-sullied by hundreds of miles of hard graft, is a joy to behold. This particular example has delivery mileage of 258 kilometres (or 160 miles in real money). So far, so exciting, but then you get to the concerning part of the description:

It is factory-new, has…the original tyres, and the wax put on by the factory still on the underside of the car.

What the advert seems to be saying is that it has been hidden away somewhere, sitting stationary giving everything inside the car time to seize up and fester. It has the original tyres, which will almost certainly have cracked and weakened over the last 30 years. The same can probably be said for every other rubber component on the car, and the new owner will probably have to strip down the engine and replace all bushes and components in the suspension. In the engine, you can bet the oil seals will have corroded due to lack of use, and other engine parts, as well as the gearbox and brake callipers, will probably have seized together without constant use or lubrication.

Now to be fair to the owner of this car, most of this may already have been taken care of - at a whopping €53,000, I certainly hope that most of the maintenance required to have the car road-going again has already been done. Then again, in the bizarre world of car collecting, does any of this actually matter? Chances are it’ll go to the home of a BMW fan who’ll lock it in a garage for another 30 years in the hope of turning a profit.

Classic cars can be a wonderful ownership prospect, and almost always require a lot of time, effort and money to keep running. If you see a low mileage example like this, just remember that lack of use isn’t always a good thing.