Keeping up with maintenance goes a long way towards keeping most cars on the road (unless theyāre BMWs, but thatās a whole other story).
Ironically, well maintained BMWs have significantly better durability than Hyundais of that era, just not reliability.
I see M57 engined BMWs doing 500k+ km all the time. ZF 6HP transmissions are pretty good too. Yet the BMW E60/E61 and similar era 3 and 7 series that had these engines and transmissions are considered very unreliable, because everything else around that super solid core breaks down every now and then. They last forever, theyāll just leave you stranded crying when some plastic pipe in the god damn cooling system breaks again.
Oh yeah, definitely.
German cars of the past are the epitome of ādurability, not reliabilityā. Now they no longer have that durability, but have increased reliability in the first part of ownership I think.
My old E-class mustāve had like 700k km or more in reality (itād been nicely adjusted to <400k km, but some modules showed higher mileageā¦ hmmmmmm) and the engine still ran just fine, transmission shifted just fineā¦ But the power steering failed, sunroof leaked and ruined the sunroof control module, and the parking sensors didnāt really work eitherā¦ Oh and I had the dreaded injector seal issue multiple times.
