May 23

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

BMW

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Mark: 2014 BMW i8 pre-purchase inspection. It's Mark from Remarkable Speaking. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver, Vancouver's best auto service experience. And we're talking cars. How are you doing, Bernie? 

Bernie: Doing very well. 

Mark: So as I mentioned, this is a BMW i8. What's a pre pur? Pre, if I could just only say it, pre-purchase inspection. 

Bernie: So pre-purchase inspection is something that you would do when you're buying a car. Very important thing to do, I think, you know, there's so many things that can be wrong with a car that you'll never know of until you have someone look at it. So it's highly important thing to do. It costs a bit of money, but it can save you thousands of dollars. We did one on a BMW i8 for a customer who was looking to buy this car. 

Mark: So what do you look at during a pre-purchase inspection? 

Bernie: Well, we look at an awful lot of things. We have our digital inspection that we do at our shop. Digital meaning it's done on a digital platform. Technicians look over the vehicle. They can take photographs of things that are good, things that are bad, things that need to be done, items that are wearing out. We take measurements of the brakes and variety of things. Test the battery. Do a pretty good look over the car. 

For a BMW i8 one really important thing, because it's such an electronic car, we do a scan on the vehicle and see what trouble codes might be stored in the system. Any European car if you leave it, if you drive it for six months, you'll have a slew of code stored for any little defect that comes up. Most of 'em don't mean anything, so it's a matter of kind of discerning are these important or not? And we do that in the process. 

Mark: So do you provide a printout for the inspection? 

Bernie: We can print it out, but normally we just present it to the customer electronically. So we'll send them a link, either through their cell phone by text or through an email. And then you can open the link up and the inspection's all there. We can print it out. But I think it actually presents better. 

We'll have a look at a few pictures. So there's the fantastic BMW i8, and we can talk more about this car in a few minutes.

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

This is the inspection. This is part of what you get. Of course, I can't screen capture the whole inspection, but as it presents out, it says 87 items that we looked at are okay. And these are just as an example in this vehicle. The bulbs are all good and we tested the battery, it's good. The brakes were in good shape. So there's a number of things here. And if you see this plus button over on the right, I'm just moving my mouse pointer around, you can hit that button and it'll open everything up and it'll explain all the items we looked at, and then you can click on those and you can get more details if there are anything. 

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

There's one item was suggested service, and we have four items requiring service. This is a list of trouble codes, and it's a screen capture of our scan tool. It had the list of the trouble codes that we found with the vehicle. We did actually clear them, so I don't know that it actually needed service, but they were items that had the potential to be looked at further.

Further down in the drill down report, the air filter we looked at, it was dirty. There's a photograph of the dirty air filter and the cabin air filter was recommended. This should probably have been orange. I mean, every technician has a certain different way of stating things, but the cabin air filter may have needed to be replaced.

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

We just put check records, maintenance schedule, because if the air filter's dirty, chances are the cabin filter hasn't been done also. And this inspection, we can also put little educational items, why it's important to change the filter. And as a client, you can read this and get some more information. Most people don't know much about cars. You think, Hey, you need a cabin filter. What the heck is that? Well, this explains a bit about it, and of course we explain that sort of thing too. 

Further items, so you can see this is a green item, brake pads, but we actually have a measurement to the brake pad. Seven millimetres is a photograph of the brakes. Brake rotors were measured, calipers are, okay. So we provide measurements on certain items, tires, brakes those sort of critical items, and you can see how they wear as the vehicle goes.

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

 So this car is a plug-in hybrid vehicle, so it does have a gasoline engine. It's got a little three cylinder engine here and it keeps the batteries charged and the electric motors running. The range in this vehicle, I believe is somewhere between maybe 25 and 35 miles of plug-in range.

2014 BMW i8 Pre Purchase Inspection

If you never plug it in, you'll be running off this gasoline, this'll keep the battery sufficiently charged to provide all the power to the vehicle. But yeah, it's a tiny engine kind of mounted in the middle of the vehicle. Looks rather dusty as vehicle has pretty low kilometers, but it is, you know, it's got a few years on it now, so dust builds up. But other than that, it's pretty good, you know, good little system for sure. And that's our show. 

Mark: Since this is such a unique vehicle, was there anything special that you looked at that you needed to check? 

Bernie: Not really, I mean, it's a unique vehicle, there's not many of these made. I actually did a little reading on it. They only made about 20,000 of these cars worldwide. So even having one of 'em come in our shop, it's kind of a rarity. We're in Vancouver, I see a few of them driving around, but I mean, I don't know how many there are in total maybe, you think worldwide there's 20,000,. Maybe there's 20 of 'em in Vancouver. I don't know, there's probably not a lot, but you see 'em driving around here and there. They're pretty awesome car. Very distinct. But there's nothing more unique that we do on this inspection than we do on anything else.

But being a hybrid vehicle, there's a couple other things to look at, and I think the scan is a really important thing because it'll reveal issues that might be there, and we didn't find much of anything on this vehicle. 

Mark: So are you able to do full service and repair on this vehicle? 

Bernie: Oh yeah, yeah, we can do everything. I mean, the great thing about being a BMW is we can do pretty much everything on it. You know, parts are available through the BMW dealership network or wherever else we get parts from. It's no problem at all. All our scan tools and diagnostic equipment hooks up to it, so it's a good, easy vehicle. We can definitely work on it. I don't know how available parts are. I mean, this is the first one we've looked at. Hopefully we'll see a few more over time, but it's a rare vehicle. 

Mark: So being a rare vehicle, how are i8s for reliability? 

Bernie: Well, thus far I think they're pretty good. But being a BMW, I think they're probably prone to the same issues that you find on a lot of other BMWs. Oil leaks and the engine coolant leaks, things like that. This car fortunately had none, only it was about 50,000 kilometres. So it's you know, practically new. But we didn't find any issues like that.

But those are the kind of things I'd expect to find over time. You know, electronic issues, I mean, it's a complex car, so there's bound to be electronic issues over time, but as far as I know, there's nothing really particularly problematic about these vehicles other than, you know, they are expensive and when things go wrong, they'll cost you money to fix cuz it's rare. Things are not gonna be shared amongst other platforms too much. 

Mark: If you're looking for service for your BMW, even if it's ani8 in Vancouver, BC Canada, the guys to see are Pawlik Automotive. You can reach them on their website, pawlikautomotive.com. You can book there your appointment, or you can call (604) 327-7112. You have to call and book ahead. They're always busy. Vancouver's best auto service experience and thank you so much for watching and listening. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Bernie. 

Bernie: Thank you, Mark, and thanks for watching.

About the author 

Bernie Pawlik

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