[Turbowned]

Originally Posted by pyro530

I disagree 100% about BMW maintenance costs being high. With the fact that the E36 is so popular for racing there are tons of aftermarket parts being made for the car still, often with better quality and engineering at a better price vs OEM. Also, because the E36 M3 (and E46 M3) shares a lot of common parts with the standard cars, junk yards can be (and are) a gold mine of parts.
With web sites like Pelican Parts, Bavarian Autosport, ECS Tuning and Turner Motorsport the cars can be very inexpensive (cheap even) to maintain

Ugh, Bav Auto has gotten several thousand of my dollars in the past 3 months thanks to my E30. I bought a 193k mile 318is, so slightly different story, but it's definitely at that age where everything is going wrong. They are very reasonable though, but RockAuto has been a champion at keeping my costs down, too. I was able to get two hub and bearing assemblies for less than half of what they cost from BavAuto (and BavAuto's weren't OEM BMW hubs either). All in all, I'll be into the car for about $5-6k and a lot of days off worth of wrenching, but it'll be a nice car when it's done.