zm coupe broken camshaft

Yikes! Don't nip my head off! Just made a suggestion.

Perhaps I am a little unrealistic. I just thought there must be some alternative to shelling out 8 grand for a new engine. See, my thinking is this. Horrible little Korean boxes can run for hundreds of thousands of miles without any mechanical defects. Other Z3M's can have long and happy lives. However, there appear to be two with the same fault in a very short space of time - to me this would suggest a manufacturing defect of some sort surely? By the sounds of it this car was never thrashed or abused, and a camshaft shouldn't just snap?! The whole engine needs careful examination for manufacturing faults.

As for the 60k miles, there is a clause called reasonable wear and tear that a manufacturer will try and wriggle through in circumstances such as this. Complete engine failure after 60k miles does not strike me as reasonable wear and tear. Stag owners in the seventies didn't accept it then, and neither should BMW owners now. I accept there is a big difference between a new engine and this one, but the fault is such an extreme one that this cannot be attributed to normal use - it's not as if it's just broken a rocker now is it?

So, did the end cap come loose allowing the camshaft to be pushed up out of its bearings and snap the timing chain? That sounds very strange, even if the crank was vibrating it's socks off the bearing cap should not have come loose.

UweM3 I hear what you're saying. I appreciate the fact that it's not a new engine at 60k, and BMW do have to draw a line somewhere or else they will have people popping up with sick E28's and E23's! It just seems a shame that there is no sense of customer awareness here, a person buys an expensive car like a Z3M fully expecting to enjoy years and many miles of problem free motoring in it, then the engine goes and eats itself. To me this is outwith the normal description of fair wear and tear as I said earlier, but BMW are a business and they will get out of spending money any way they can. I suppose their offer of 5k is reasonable, but even so that doesn't begin to cover the labour costs incurred at the dealer. To me what they should have done is waived the labour cost outright becuase this seems like an engineering defect, and so the owner cannot realistically be held responsible for such a failure, especially not with a FSH behind the car.