Cumulative data on S65 engine failures.

[SenorFunkyPants]

Shame.....I had messaged Jason about the same time and didn't get a reply, so I was hoping you would have better luck than me.

[swamp2]

I pm'd one of the admins not one of the founders/owners. He replied he did not have enough privileges to help so I asked if he would escalate. Not too hopeful...

[signes]

Still far too many variables to be able to draw any firm conclusions. Causation for all of these cases is still an unknown. Were all maintained properly, with regular oil changes and other service? How were each of the cars cared for on a daily basis?
How many had a significant number of overrevs? You can go on forever... Failures may manifest in the "weak" part of the engine's design but may in fact have been caused by other actions that may be outside the scope of "normal" use. At some point every mechanical device will fail...

I've read all of the posts on this issue and the very helpful work that many have done on tolerances in the S65, so there may well be an issue. However, hard to draw *any* conclusions from this data set (so small with nearly no supporting information due to cause, although I understand that getting that kind of information is essentially impossible to collect.)

[BPMSport]

Figured I'd add this one - just found the pictures on a memory stick I misplaced..

2011 - 29K miles, stock car. Engine was replaced under warranty.

Engine oil at minimum level came on while tracking.

After leaving the track it gave out on the freeway.

Spun two bearings, Cylinders 1 and 2.

[StealYourFace]

Wouldn't it make sense to apply the number of m3 owners on the board (not forum members, I'm on here and I don't own one) and apply that number toward production numbers to come up with a more accurate ratio of forum m3 owners to forum m3 owners with a motor failure?

I'm not an engineer or mathematician of any sort, so if I'm wrong don't bash me.

[JPH704]

Thanks for the data collection. Will subscribe and keep tabs on this thread.

[swamp2]

Originally Posted by StealYourFace

Wouldn't it make sense to apply the number of m3 owners on the board (not forum members, I'm on here and I don't own one) and apply that number toward production numbers to come up with a more accurate ratio of forum m3 owners to forum m3 owners with a motor failure?

I'm not an engineer or mathematician of any sort, so if I'm wrong don't bash me.

Yes, exactly as we have discussed in this thread. We would use the m3post.com total number of failures divided by the total number of m3post.com members who report owning an M3. It is not the most accurate but it is more accurate than assuming the the divisor is the total number of M3s produced. The forum owners/mods appears to be unwilling/unable to help with this.

[swamp2]

Since I got a "I can't help" from a mod I also reached out directly to Jason. No reply. This is really unfortunate. It should be a really quick/simple task and shouldn't violate any members nor the boards privacy concerns

[chris719]

Mods were deleting any threads I posted with a certain video of an M235i in it, without a reply, warning, or any notice at all. They will not help you compile data that may make BMW look bad.

[DavidZ]

Are any commonalities being looked at like, um, say, DCT/6MT, cold climate, mostly city driving, break in procedure closely followed?

[swamp2]

Jason has shared one detail: Approximately 17,700 folks report some form M3 in the "drives" field. I asked if there was any attempt to discern if this includes all generations of the M3, but have not heard back on that yet. It seems quite safe to conclude this is all series of M3s since the total US production quantity is about 30k and there is pretty well no way over half of all E9X M3 owners are forum members.

Can we do any better for an estimation of a failure rate with this data? Maybe just a bit.

1. This site caters to E9X M3 folks, there are no dedicated sections to the other series except a relatively small subsection of the E9X section for E46 M3.
2. There were very roughly the same number of E46 M3 made as E9X M3, actually a few more E46, but roughly equivalent.
3. It's probably safe to say that a very high percentage of members here would post about something as tragic as a total catastrophic engine failure.
4. To get a conservative failure rate, upper bound, we want to have the denominator (or relevant pool) as small as possible.

So let's assume half of this 17.7k number are E9X owners. Some are simply lying and others own some other series of M3. Let's also assume only half of these folks would report an engine failure. This gives us a total pool of about 4.5k folks. With 22 failures we arrive at just a bit under 0.5%.

No matter how much we try to squeeze the denominator down we still have a worst case scenario failure rate of half that of the E46 M3. And that is not even apples to apples since we assumed 100% reporting of failures in the E46 M3 case, which we know absolutely is not realistic, especially back in those days of the "primitive" internet...

Again, it is abundantly clear that this is nothing like the E46 case. There is an overall quite low risk of failure somewhere between about 0.1% and 0.5%

[SenorFunkyPants]

I'll add that I searched Google a while ago using various keywords to try and find other failures and added the couple that I found.
I still have a failure noted by Mike above (thanks for that) and one from a UK M3 forum to add but apart from those 2 that is about it for now.

Originally Posted by DavidZ

Are any commonalities being looked at like, um, say, DCT/6MT, cold climate, mostly city driving, break in procedure closely followed?

The DCT/MT split seems about in line with the number of each transmission sold.
The cold climate might play a part - Canada has a few failures against I what presume is quite a small number of cars bought. It might be worth looking at by someone with a better knowledge of USA/Canada weather than me. California gets quite a big share of failures but that is offset by the large number of sales there as well as the relatively lower quality fuel and perhaps a greater tendency to mod their cars. The almost complete lack of Euro cars in the list is still something I think ought to tell us something.

[swamp2]

Originally Posted by SenorFunkyPants

California gets quite a big share of failures but that is offset by the large number of sales there as well as the relatively lower quality fuel and perhaps a greater tendency to mod their cars. The almost complete lack of Euro cars in the list is still something I think ought to tell us something.

Did you happen to note some suspicion of knock directly from Clevite in the main bearing clearance thread?

[SenorFunkyPants]

Originally Posted by swamp2

Did you happen to note some suspicion of knock directly from Clevite in the main bearing clearance thread?

I did....I still think its in the mix somewhere.
I'm also beginning to wonder if the all in one coil anti-knock assemblies are as resilient as they should be. There are several threads where fault codes have been traced to the coil unit. Interestingly there was a revision to the coil packs in 2010/2011.

[SenorFunkyPants]

Updated the first post with the latest data (added 3 fails).

Also added this:



Notes
Only includes USA cars and where a location state was provided.
Supercharged cars excluded.
California cars account for 35% of the failures against having 12% of the total USA Population.

[US///M3]

Originally Posted by swamp2

Since I got a "I can't help" from a mod I also reached out directly to Jason. No reply. This is really unfortunate. It should be a really quick/simple task and shouldn't violate any members nor the boards privacy concerns

Try SCOTT26, "He" should be able to tell us how many engines they replaced under warranty and how many were denied warranty work.

And it'll be easy to exclude all the SC'ed cars since there are less than 3,000 kits sold by all the different tuners combined for the S65, I think.

[signes]

Originally Posted by SenorFunkyPants

Updated the first post with the latest data (added 3 fails).

Also added this:



Notes
Only includes USA cars and where a location state was provided.
Supercharged cars excluded.
California cars account for 35% of the failures against having 12% of the total USA Population.

What/who submitted the failure in CO? Haven't seen/heard of one around here. FYI, might be mislabeled: you have 2 in CT in the table on the first page but only one showing in the chart.

[SenorFunkyPants]

Originally Posted by signes

What/who submitted the failure in CO? Haven't seen/heard of one around here. FYI, might be mislabeled: you have 2 in CT in the table on the first page but only one showing in the chart.

The CO car is still listed as a USA car - the proposer asked to remain Anon.
The other CT car was Supercharged and therefore left out.
Thanks
Peter.

[swamp2]

Originally Posted by SenorFunkyPants

California cars account for 35% of the failures against having 12% of the total USA Population.

This is quite dramatic and is telling us something, almost for sure.

You may have already mentioned it but what is the source for the 12% figure?

Do you think there is any bias in this data based on how many CA M3 owners are active on this forum vs. how many (less) may be active in other states. We are a car obsessed culture here. Just brainstorming.

[FogCityM3]

M3s in california would be a more relevant stat than overall population, e.g. maybe 50% of all M3s sold are in Cali, but probably unknowable.

Originally Posted by swamp2

This is quite dramatic and is telling us something, almost for sure.

You may have already mentioned it but what is the source for the 12% figure?

Do you think there is any bias in this data based on how many CA M3 owners are active on this forum vs. how many (less) may be active in other states. We are a car obsessed culture here. Just brainstorming.

[SenorFunkyPants]

Originally Posted by swamp2

This is quite dramatic and is telling us something, almost for sure.
You may have already mentioned it but what is the source for the 12% figure?
Do you think there is any bias in this data based on how many CA M3 owners are active on this forum vs. how many (less) may be active in other states. We are a car obsessed culture here.

I Googled population USA and population California and got 314M and 38M which hopefully equates to 12%.
I'm very poorly positioned to offer much opinion on whether the figures are reasonable for California but they do seem out of kilter.
I can't imagine running an M3 with an ECU tune on 91 octane in a hot climate is ever going to be a good idea.

[swamp2]

Originally Posted by SenorFunkyPants

I Googled population USA and population California and got 314M and 38M which hopefully equates to 12%.
I'm very poorly positioned to offer much opinion on whether the figures are reasonable for California but they do seem out of kilter.
I can't imagine running an M3 with an ECU tune on 91 octane in a hot climate is ever going to be a good idea.

That is a reasonable first order approximation for sure. However, my guess would be that the % of the total US M3s in CA is significantly higher. That would be based on many contributing facts:

-CA is a car obsessed state
-Incomes are higher than national average
-BMWs and nice/sporty cars are very popular in CA (higher % than many other states)