whats with the springs on our cars,i think they must be made of cheese.i had my car in at the dealers a month or so ago as i had this matallic sound coming from my the rear of my car and thought it sounded like a spring had gone and i was right!,over the weekend the second rear spring has gone :thumbsdown:well at leased i think its the older one,the new one should last a little longer that a month?i managed to retreve the bit of spring off the road and having looked at it you can see where the rust has got at it and the point where the spring has fractured,i was also suprised to see how thin the spring is, i thought the coil would be a lot thicker.my car is an 07 with 15000 on the clock and i know the full history of the car and its not been tracked or anything like that.this type of things ok at the moment but when the warranty runs out this all has to be sorted out of your own pocket :thumbsdown:
springs
- Thread starter etedlm
- Start date
When you get it sorted, let us know which spring it was.
Z4coupebeaver
Member
One of my My springs went earlier this year. I asked one of our materials engineer to take a look at both the failed and the intact spring and he diagnosed that the spring had failed from stress corrosion and that the other one showed signs of suffering stress corrosion and would fail soon. I took the car into the dealer with the info from the materials engineer and they replaced both.
The materials engineer suspects that the chemical composition of the spring is suceptible to chloride attack resulting in the stress corrosion.
In short, if BMW won't change the material, we are stuck with the problem. It isn't mileage related but chloride exposure.
Just to clarify - this hasn't been confirmed but it looks highly probable.
The materials engineer suspects that the chemical composition of the spring is suceptible to chloride attack resulting in the stress corrosion.
In short, if BMW won't change the material, we are stuck with the problem. It isn't mileage related but chloride exposure.
Just to clarify - this hasn't been confirmed but it looks highly probable.
Z4coupebeaver
Member
The difficulty from BMW's side thought is that this is a very difficult problem to predict or test for at development stage. I would have thought this must already be costing BMW a fortune in warranty repairs.
bmw will take a long term view,the 1st 3 years on warranty claims and take the knock of replacing them(when cars go in for warranty claims they do a vehicle health check and sting the owner for all kinds of things not covered on warranty so claw somthing back in that way)in my case 2 coils failed in 2yrs and only 15000mls so at that rate the car will be going for new coils at the owners expense 3 or 4 times in the life of the car so bmw just on coils in this case will be well in front :thumbsdown: i could go for after market coils but i dont really want to at this time with the car being just over 2 yrs old.
WOnder if aftermarket ones would have the same problem and why BMW don`t remedy the problem (if they can).
When I took my 3.0 in for a Spring replacement the dealers mentioned that they just turn brittle around the bottom and break - at least they don`t break in half I suppose. They denied it was a common fault on Z4`s however but said they`ve had a few in.
When I took my 3.0 in for a Spring replacement the dealers mentioned that they just turn brittle around the bottom and break - at least they don`t break in half I suppose. They denied it was a common fault on Z4`s however but said they`ve had a few in.
well i got my car back today with the vehicle health check attached to the printout of what repair they had done to my car.it came back with 2 pages of what they had sopposed to have checked but the 1st thing i noticed was they hadn't even had the wipers on as the windscreen still had a little bit of dust on it when i took the car in and still had when i drove it away :thumbsdown: so one of the simple things easy enough to check had'nt been!this im afraid seems to happen at most or all main dealers 
ps,not thou they would find anything wrong with my car but they tick the box of one of the simple things on a car and can't even manage to check that so god knows about the big things like valve clearances 
ps,not thou they would find anything wrong with my car but they tick the box of one of the simple things on a car and can't even manage to check that so god knows about the big things like valve clearances Could be the emergency brake when engaged. Try getting in and out with the emergency brake disengaged, no creeking noise = source identified.DL-C said: