I am planning to buy an 07 328i coupe from a friend. When I called the local BMW dealer and gave the VIN number for maintenance/repair history check, I was told that aside from the scheduled oil/filter change, one of the brake light bulbs was replaced. I asked "that's it?"!

If I sell my 2003 MCS and the prospective buyer does the same, he/she is in for a surprise! The list will be too long that the service adviser may not even want to print it out (or may ask for a toner/paper fee) :D

As the title says, I am wondering whether it will be difficult to explain all that warranty work to a buyer (e.g., clutch, steering column, power steering pump, etc etc). How would you approach it? "Well, it was an early model car that came with certain problems, but they were all fixed under warranty, so you have nothing to worry about"?

 

As long as it's been trouble-free since, that's probably a good approach. I would think a buyer who's savvy enough to call the dealer for a service history is probably going to understand and expect that the first year or two of a new model / design typically have some issues that have to be ironed out.

 

Run a Carfax on it and probably most of the service work will be shown. If it all shows on the Carfax it might not be good for a sale to an individual, but trading it at a dealership might be the way to go as I doubt they will look at a Carfax on it, but you never know. I personally would NOT buy a used car that has a lengthy repair history no matter what the explanation.

 

I'm not sure that a lengthy list of warranty work will be a big turnoff to a buyer, like you say early in the cars life cycle and lots of things can go wrong, hopefully there aren't a lot of recent work orders?

 

No, nothing major recently. Most of the stuff was performed within the first 50-60K miles with the exception of power steering pump (around 85K miles). Currently I have 110K miles on the clock.