Originally Posted by
az3579
That is absolutely gorgeous. Man, what I'd do for a proper set of M-style bumpers. I will be going around the car and painting all of the door and bumper trims back to black. The silver is too much for me and need to break it up. The paint on the plastic bits is also extremely faded and worn out, so the trim needs refreshing as well. All the clearcoat is coming off the door handles too. Thankfully silver hides pretty much everything!
15mpg sounds horrible to live with every day; I'm not surprised you got rid of it for that reason. My 525i touring gets on average about 22-23 mpg with mixed city/highway driving, which is actually pretty remarkable as its EPA figures are 17 city / 24 hwy, and I can certainly get between 26-28 mpg purely on the highway and 20 mpg purely city. It's still better than the X3 I was also considering before buying this. Those SAVs are horrible on gas.
As much as I love E46 tourings, the gas mileage is so much better that it would be worth saving up the extra money, selling this, and starting over on the E46. This car was too cheap ($2k) to pass up.