I Bought a $50,000 Electric BMW for $500 Because the Dealer Said It Wasn’t Worth Fixing
I bought a $50,000 electric BMW for $500. How’d I get that deal? All because the dealership told the previous owner that the car needed more repairs than it was worth. It’s in my shop right now, basically dead. It doesn’t charge and it doesn’t drive. But if I’m right, I think I could get this thing running again with a couple of cheap parts. But if I’m wrong, I just threw away my last $500 on this giant carbon fiber paper weight. I also owe Joey $500 and he will never ever see that money if this car doesn’t drive. Let’s get into it. Wait, what? How was your date, dude? Dude, Joey, I mean like she’s like this. Yeah. But then she was like, then she said like 500 bucks. I was like, I don’t have $500 on me. That’s a lot of money, dude. I said, you take like checks, whatever you What you got, man? Pass up. What do you mean? What’s up, man? Can’t pass it up. So, we got i3. Yep. Lady went to the dealership. They told her an outrageous amount. Yeah. And it’s here. It is beyond what it’s worth. We got 474800 worth of work. Yeah. But it’ be perfect for what you do. Perfect. No, no, no. No, no, no. You got to see it. You got to see it. Joey, you know how Doug Demiro always says, “And this I don’t know who that is.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, it’s just it’s this guy who’s been on YouTube for a couple years now. Okay. little creator trying to help him out a little bit. You know what I mean? He always says, “And this and blah blah blah insert quirky car here.” This is probably the quirkiest of the quirky cars. These are probably my most favorite EV for a whole bunch of reasons. The coolest thing about this and the least obvious is it has a carbon fiber reinforced frames. Look at this. All carbon fiber on the inside, right? And get this. This is the crazy part. Look, there’s no B-pillar at all. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how strong the carbon fiber chassis is in this. The entire insides made me have recycled material. I think this is all elephant nose here. An exposed carbon roof. How many cars do you get an exposed carbon roof in nowadays? You just don’t. Look at these skinny tires. Those are adorable. And the reason for this, obviously, is efficiency. The next thing I want to talk about is the turning radius. The turning radius on these cars is absolutely insane. When I tell you these are like a small go-kart, these are literally a small go-kart. And they’re rear wheel drive. The craziest thing about this thing, it actually uses a Kimco scooter motor. A literal twocylinder scooter motor is what they use to charge a battery in this thing. It’s called a range extender. Similar to the ELR, they’ll have that generator in the front, but this uses a twocylinder scooter motor. It’s literally this big. And yeah, Joey, dude, the seats are made out of all kinds of recycled material. I think they’re made out of fishing nets and women’s panty hose. Yeah. I have another question. Yeah. What’s up? Or just a question in general? Yeah. Yeah. Why does have a tow hook, Joey? You know, I wish I’m not in park. Never get tired of pushing cars. Listen, dude. I’m telling you. Dude, why is this thing so hard to push? I have no idea, dude. It’s not that big. All right, hold on. Ready? Ready? Ready? Oh, it’s going to run me over. Quick reminder, this thing weighs like nothing until you have to push it. Then it weighs exactly as much as my poor life decisions. You can let go of it now. It’s fine. Open the door. Is it in park? Yeah. Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. Oh, shoot. Oh w sorry about that. Um you sure it’s in park? Why isn’t it working? Shoot, dude. Are you pushing? This is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. What happened to that leg day there, Rich? God. Come on, Lee. Today is leg day. You got us into this mess. Oh my god. Did I ever? Feels like we’re pushing a car with four flat tires. It’s in neutral. Three little trying to push it. Let’s go into regen. All right. Show you what the Why is that so hard? It’s in neutral right now. Neutral to the end. Right. When you push it, it’s it it like varies. The faster you try to push it, the more it tries to push back on you. So, even in neutral, this car doesn’t want to roll. It’s not true regenerative braking, but the inverter keeps a tiny magnetic drag on the motor to protect the drivetrain. It feels like turning one of those wind up flashlights. More effort, more resistance. Lee, I don’t know how he was able to do it, but he was able to get this car for $500. Ready? Title. Title. Title’s good. Money’s right here. You got one, two, three, four, five. 500 ones right here. There you go. That’s great math. Awesome. So, fabulous math. This is This is real. Real title, real car. All right, Lee, tell me what’s wrong with it. She was driving on one of the local roads and the car just started going crazy and then just started coasting. Eventually, she got off the side road dead. Every idiot light on. Went to the dealership. They told her just under six grand. It was like 58 50 almost 59. The dealer quoted her six grand because they replace everything first and diagnosed later. I diagnosed first because well, I don’t have six grand. She was like, “No.” She wanted a second opinion. She heard about me, had it towed. Oh, by the way, this is Lee from Advanced Technologies. He’s the owner. It’s uh out what? Tell them what you do again, Lee. Audi shop or something like that. Works for Audi. Specialize in European vehicles diagnostic and repair. Gotcha. Okay. Uh in the Northshore. Anyways, so she had to no free promo. Okay. Go ahead. So, she wanted a second opinion. She brought it in. I was able to cut about a,000 bucks off the bill. Yeah. The quote. And she elected, you know what? She didn’t want it. She didn’t trust it. She didn’t feel safe in the car. She elected to go to another hybrid. She told me she bought a Honda, but she didn’t tell me the model, anything else that I don’t know. So, I looked for the charging cable. No charging cable. So, I called her. Do you have a charging cable? No. So, she’s been running off this entire time off the range extender, charging, driving, everything. I don’t know how she’s been doing it. She said she lost it years ago. So, this had Yeah. Yeah. The range extender finally started dying. The moped engine, right? Started dying. No charging. She drove this thing until no charge. If you’re new to these, Rex means range extender. It’s not actually powering the wheels. It’s literally a scooter generator under the trunk that charges the high voltage battery. Weirdest hybrid design ever, but it’s still pretty cool. I plugged it in. Nope. Charging fault in the system. All my computer’s charging fault. We had a grounding isolation fault. All right. So, I told her and she didn’t want to do anything. Okay. That’s when I was like, you know what? Who would need the car better than you? Anybody? You. So, here we are. This is the happiest day of my life, Joey. I love this stuff, man. We have a code scanner here. We’ll look through some codes and see what’s going on with it. And then um but this is awesomely. So, you’re gonna find probably 20 plus codes in it easily. Okay. What does Phoenix think? The fact that you could fit five people in this thing is crazy to me. Look at this. Come on. Come on, Phoenix. Make it easy for you. There you go. Come on, kiddo. It said that she was one of the people that just got into the car, expected to drive it. Hey, it’s an EV, doesn’t need maintenance. You know, one of those people. Oh, yeah. You get it and go. and the uh the title, she bought it when it had 11,000 mi on it. Now it has about 45 to 50,000 mi on it. So, we have to safely assume that in those uh 40,000 miles that she didn’t do any maintenance to them. Yeah. So, it might just be a picture of a scooter motor at this point. It could Yeah, it really could be a picture of one the back. Oh, my throw me my favorite. Oh, my favorite. What the good older Oh, no. Right here. Right here. The good old check engine light trick. Let me see. You sure you didn’t own this before, Joey? Let me see. Oh, everything stay on. Oh, yeah. She had the check engine light on. She I know. Let’s put that tape back right back on there. On there. You couldn’t even tell. It actually does. Service required. Click on that. Oh, engine oil. It needed it since July. up. So, it almost seems like she was driving and then ran out of juice and the Rex wouldn’t turn on. Yeah, that’s what it seems like. I mean, it’s not turning on now. I mean, when we pushed it from where it was, technically, it should have turned on when it detected the battery charge was low. Yeah, he mentioned the heater, didn’t he? Mentioned the heater not working. 80 goes to 84. What a weird temperature to go to. So, that’s just blowing cold air. Where’s the little scoot scoop? Where’s the little scoot screw Andrew? It’s under here, man. We should definitely at least run a diagnostic on the car to see what codes it’s showing. We didn’t do that on other cars because they didn’t show check engine lights. She actually had the check engine light taped up. So, uh, let’s run the codes real quick and see what we get for it. Joey, I got you something. Something you’ve always wanted. Corvette, what do you want for Christmas? Corvette 067. Ready? No. It’s in here. Open the box. You’re going to love it. Nothing in this. Yeah, cuz it’s right here. Silly Billy. It’s an Aura frame. Oh, why is what you’ve always wanted. A picture of me. Oh. Every year I tell myself I have to get something really, really nice for Joey. And every year I want to get you a gift card, but a gift card is not the way. Stop getting people gift cards for Christmas. People that you actually care about, get them something awesome like Aura Frames. This is a picture of you. I know, but Joey, the people that you care about most are the hardest ones to shop for. Like my mom, what do I get? What do you even get your mom for for Christmas? You know what I mean? Yeah. I don’t know. But Joey, you we could have something on here together. A picture of me. Picture of the Humvey. Picture of the builds. Look at that. Look at that picture. Remember that, Joey? Oh, good old Utah. Remember that we went to Utah? Those are good pictures, too. Yeah. Great quality. Yeah. There’s actually a lot more photos than me on this device. I’m not surprised. And it’s super easy to do, Joey. All you got to do is upload photos from your phone. I have the app on my phone. You can send it right to the frame. Just download the Aura app and connect to Wi-Fi. The really cool part, you could actually preload the frame before you give it to someone. So, you see what you’re doing to me. So, you I thought to myself, what does Joey really really like? There are 75 photos of me. You could actually set the duration, too. So, every photo will take 45 minutes to cycle to the next one. Oh, awesome. So, you could actually look at me for about an hour before the next one actually shows up. Great. Pretty cool, right? Always wanted that. Now, for a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting or auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura’s bestselling Carver Matte Frames, named number one by Wire Cutter by using promo code richbuilds at checkout. That’s a rafra.com. Promo code richbuilds. This deal is exclusive to viewers and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get in time for the holidays. Support the channel by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Look at this. Huh. The van, huh? All your favorite things. That’s my Porsche. Okay, now here’s the big moment. We’re actually going to see what’s wrong with this $500 BMW. If the scanner says battery pack dead, I may as well just give Joey custody of the car now and walk away. I’m getting vibes you didn’t like my gift for some reason. I do like the gift. Okay. I want to make sure. Okay. You just started it off with like, you know, how you’ve always wanted this. Oh, I thought you Joey, I’ve always wanted pictures of your cars and you. Yeah. Well, I mean like we’re like friends and stuff. That’s I I have pictures of my friend. I have pictures of you on my phone. That’s not weird. Picture you like I think you were sleeping one day and just whatever. All right, so let’s see. We’re all friends here. Um to 10 codes. Fuel fill door open. Open open. P138F. I’ve looked that up. Assumed and one misfire detected. All right. How’d you get it to turn on? Cylinder two misfire. So, there’s two miss this is only a two-cylinder BMW scooter engine. Okay. So, they’re both misfiring. Random multiple cylinder misfire detected. Fuel filled door open. Request sensor switch. Performance stuck off. DTC definition not found. Please refer to service manual. That’s a pending one. Okay. So, no one misfire again. So, so there’s actually like three codes and they’re just repeated. Exactly. So, it seems like it has a Well, we don’t know what these other ones are. The P138F. I’ll have to look that up. Mhm. Just sounds like it has a lot to do with the scooter motor. I think so, too. So, I think this might be an easy one. However, I don’t know how accurate what BMW said was. Uh, the P138F is the crankshaft position sensor. Oh, boy. Hopefully, it’s not a real motor problem. But, it’s funny that he said that she never charged this and she relied heavily on the what do you call it? Uh, it’s called the Rex. Rex. Yeah, the range extender. So interesting. It could be a failed or faulty range extender. Okay, we could chase codes forever, but I’m going to keep this simple. A lot of things aren’t working in this car, but if we could fix any two things, whether that’s charging, driving, or heat, I’m going to call this a win. Joey, as of right now, we have a problem for pretty much every day of the week. If we combine what uh Lee told us with what we saw in the diagnostic, we have the following problems. Number one, we have won’t charge. That’s a Monday problem. That’s a Monday problem. That sounds like a bad Monday. That’s a bad Monday. On Tuesday, we have heat no work. Okay, what we have on Wednesday? Rex won’t turn on. Thursday we have high voltage isolation crank position sensor all the misfires all of them at once. Now there’s a problem for literally every day of the week. There’s a problem for every day of the week plus an extra one for Sunday when you cry quietly in the garage. But if we think about this from a problem solving perspective, a lot of these are interconnected, right? Think so. I think they are. Yeah. So if we go with won’t charge, we should combine won’t charge with high voltage isolation. Probably the heat not working also with high voltage isolation. Crank position sensor wrecks not turning on and all the misfires could be related as well. There are two big issues. We have high voltage isolation and we have a Rex issue. Isolation fault means there’s high voltage electricity is leaking where it shouldn’t be. Most of the time it’s coolant intrusion. Literally liquid messing with 400 volt insulation. That’s EV nightmare fuel. On this episode of Rich Cleans Another Car. Dude, I listen I like cleaning. Now, she has a lot of sand in the car. Yeah. So, I’m assuming she’s like one of those beachgoers. You know how like people have like the salt life sticker on their cars, which I that makes me cringe so hard it’s not even funny. But I think she lived near the beach, it seems. Um, you know what, Joey? Let’s do the scumbag thing. Let’s look her up. All right. I I just want to see what she looks like. I just want Promise me we’ll see what she looks like. Will we do that? Yeah. find anybody. Guess not. All right. Oh. Oh, thing looks terrible, man. Yeah, there’s some rodents in here and stuff. Been eating through all this stuff. Jeez. What the heck is going on here? This is intense, man. This is pretty dirty. Yeah, surprisingly dirty. This is so complicated looking, right? It’s like a space shuttle. You got to be careful with stuff like this because two sets of technicians were in here. The dealership was in here and I’m not really sure if Lee had this cover off as well. But, uh, I’m looking around and nothing is completely obvious as yet. I want to clean some things up and see if there’s anything obvious, any broken wires and figuring out why this thing doesn’t go. Um, I also don’t know with Oh, is there any oil in it? Is it that clear or is it What is What is this telling me? There’s oil in it. That’s good. Yeah, has oil on it, but it needs an I’m not sure how high that’s supposed to be. It’s at least in there. See what we got here. Um, I got a question. Yeah. Where are the spark plugs, Joey? That’s a really good question. Um, do you have to They’re not under the intake, are they? Oh, no. I think it’s going to be a pain in the butt, man. That’s the intake. Yeah, I think they’re under intake. I take it. I think you do, man. That’ be the injectors right there, right? All right. So, I can’t really do much with this. Uh, after thinking about this more, uh, clearly this woman drove this thing into the ground. Uh, that’s really not how you’re supposed to drive these things. As you could see in the display, it said that this thing is screaming for an oil change. No maintenance has been done. I think this baby little scooter engine has been overworked. Uh, it needs an oil change. It likely needs the spark plugs replaced. Uh, it did say that there was a crank position sensor fault and misfiring. So, I went ahead and I ordered an oil change kit for it. I ordered a new crank position sensor and new spark plugs and coils for this as well. The whopping total for that $142. No way. Yeah. Now, the dealership estimate initially said it’s going to be like 900,000 and 2,000. Yeah. They were saying it was like 250 bucks a coil. Exactly. Right. But I got I I did get nonbrandame ones they used. For now, I really do want to focus on why the car isn’t charging. So, the car isn’t charging and the heat isn’t turning on. And I believe that those issues are related. Uh, anything related to heat, which is high voltage, and charging, which is obviously high voltage, those might be related. So, I want to look around. Uh, I want to check the fuses first to make sure we’re not missing anything obvious and uh see where we’re getting that high voltage fault coming from. So, we’re fighting two problems. We’re fighting an issue with the Rex, the range extender, and we’re also troubleshooting a high voltage fault issue. So, this should be fun. Let’s poke around the fuse box. See what we find. Okay, so now the fuse box is underneath. What a Look, isn’t this nice? This little fabric like instruction manual. I like this a lot. You’re opening it like you’re actually going to use it. I just like to state that you’ve been picking on me cuz I suggested using this to find the fuse panel and you’re like, “No, what do we need that for? We don’t need instructions.” Joey, the fuse panel’s right here underneath. You didn’t? Did you know that? That’s crazy. Yeah, I did because I looked it up in the book. Were you saying something earlier, Joey? I couldn’t hear you. Well, that’s a good spot. Oh, look at that. Oh, and it pops down at you. Ah, there’s a treasure map. What? A treasure map. Let me see. What does it tell you? Tells us. Oh, that’s for real. Yeah. No, really. This is real. The phone fuse. The bright 4×4 fuse. Do you even know what you’re testing? No. Honestly, I’m just touching the wires like this under the dash. Yeah, it’s good. I’m It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. Still good. Still good. Tested all the fuses. They all tested good. So, now what? Uh, so there’s an isolation fault. The number one culprit of that that I’ve seen in pretty much every Tesla that’s coming in the shop, it’s usually is a coolant leak somewhere, like in the motor. A coolant leak in the motor, even though it’s in the back, or a coolant lead someplace else to to cause a pretty major issue. So, there’s probably water. I don’t know if she parked this under a tree. It looks like she did. Oh, yeah. Um, so maybe there was like water intrusion somewhere, but we’re going to check the frunk out, see if anything obvious there. Now, best case scenario, we find one corroded component. Worst case, we find mouse soup and the car tries to kill me. Technical difficulties. I don’t know how the thought you owned one of these. I did, but there you go. That was weird. Oh, that’s not that’s small. How was that so hard? It’s even How did it even get in here? I think this this woman just like found a car and just drove it. She’s just like, I’m just going to drive it. No maintenance. It’s an EV. EVs don’t need maintenance, remember? Got these plugs here. So, this is all starting to come back to me now. Do this, right? Hya. Huzzah. Huzzah. Just made that look simple. Yeah. I know. P right off, baby. It’s almost like you’ve done this before. That’s a 12vt battery. Um, a lot of people say that. Um, where’s the 12? Right there. See the little skinny thing back there? That’s a That thing’s tiny. It’s It’s a baby. We’re going to test the battery first. Then I’m gonna see whether or not it needs a boost because I know that on a lot of German cars it leads to really funky issues if your 12volt battery isn’t fully charged. We’ll look at that next. All right, test it. I mean, there is some corrosion there. What I want to do is I want to right there there’s a little rust. It’s not too crazy, but again, not ideal. I’m not really seeing anything. There’s no wetness here. Nothing damp. Let’s check the uh the 12volt battery and see uh how that’s doing. This looks a little corroded. It’s not terrible though. It does not look terrible at all. I wonder how old it is. People say, “Well, how old’s the battery?” Every for some mysterious reason, every single person that watches videos thinks that like change the battery, change the battery. Like, listen, once we start getting into batteries that cost more than like 20 bucks, I’m out. Can’t We have a stack of dead ones. We literally do. Yeah. Minus the top one. We we should take like an inventory of all the dead batteries we have. Every battery we have except for that one sitting on top are dead. Every car every car that comes in here, it’s going to there’s like a dead battery. I take it out and I just say I don’t know why. Maybe it’s like What’s your deal? I mean, normally we take this outside and wash it, but it is it is freezing outside. We won’t last a minute out there. This is This is not in a very convenient place at all, is it? Joey, we don’t need this anymore. You know how the lady was using this to push around cattle on her farm? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re done with this, man. I think if I know anything about anything that you do, Yeah. we’re going to need that more than ever. No way. Yep. No way. I The plan is to never put this back on. Do you honestly think we’re going to put this back on and pull this thing around? I can No, we’ll push it around, but we won’t use that. Oh, Joey, you have little faith. What I’m seeing so far, Joey, it’s not looking good. Too bad. 2023 battery was made. It’s not even that old. See that? I know. I’m debating whether to even take it out at this point. I think we know this is a good battery two years ago and only has 50,000 mi on it. I don’t I’m going to I think it’s safe to assume that this battery is probably pretty decent. I mean, that’s what I’m seeing so far. Um Joey, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold it. Hold on. Hold on. You holding? I haven’t moved. I think I see the problem. So, as I’m moving the battery, dude, check this out. Get it knee level. Check that out right there. Get down there. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, yeah. Go down a little bit. Oh, yeah. I didn’t see that before. Hang on. Yeah. You’re like there, right? Oh, wow. Look how corroded that is. You know what that is? No. Corrod. That’s the heater. Oh, it’s the heater. That’s the high voltage heater. Yeah. Look at that high voltage cable going to it. That’s probably the reason why the a the heat’s not working. But doesn’t it Hang on. Let me zoom out here. Doesn’t it have like seal or something? I guess not. The high voltage clips on the Tesla. Remember how hard those are to get out? I know. I think they tell me it’s getting water in it. I mean, it’s that’s probably coolant. Remember that’s that’s Yeah, that’s So, it uses coolant in the heater. Yeah. So, that silver box with the corrosion sticking out of it is the heater module. It’s basically a giant electric kettle for coolant. And when it corrods, there’s no heat and no charging. One dumb part kills two systems. But if I if I was a bedding man, I would say I would say that’s it. So, let me see how hard this is. That’s just plastic, man. Just keep I’m just going to pop that out. Okay, there you go. There it is. Oh, yeah. Oh, you can see the see the seam. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah, it looks pretty bad actually. Yeah, that’s what it is. Yep. It’s just a bad heater. And that will cause it to do all these things. Yeah, because if there’s a high voltage issue, electricity is weird, man. Which which that clearly is the high voltage fault. Uh it means that there’s high voltage where there shouldn’t be. So, it’s there is resistance on that. There’s heightened resistance. So, that pretty much once it detects it, it’s outside the the high voltage safety loop. It’s just like something’s going on here. There’s a leak. So, it’s not even getting power because it won’t let it It’s not even getting power, I don’t think. So, that could also if it detects a high voltage fault. Yeah. That also could affect charging as well. Interesting. Yeah. So, okay. So, now where do we get a heater? Well, BMW’s got them in stock for,000 bucks each. Well, let’s see what they cost. BMW. All right. All right. You recording? I’m recording. Joey, I’m going to use this can very sparingly because this can was literally $15. And I can’t prove it, but I know for a fact that this electronic cleaner, uh, brake clean, carb cleaner, WD40, it’s all the same thing. I just can’t prove it, Joey. I can’t prove it, but I know it is. Like, this is Look at this. I have to use this sparingly cuz watch. Ready? That’s it. Can’t use too much. Can’t use too much. That’s $15. $15. $15. $15. That’s all I’m going to use. I’m going to take this can back. Uh what I want to do next is I want to see if I could undo these clamps. Now, I’m not 100% sure if these modules require programming, but uh it’s going to be a real problem if it does. I don’t know where else to really get one of these, but at the very minimum, I want to take this thing off to see uh what lurks underneath. But you could definitely tell there’s a lot of corrosion going on in there. And also at the bottom, this is another thing about these cars that are carbon fiberbodied, grounding points. There’s quite a few grounding points in this car. If you look carefully, that one’s all corroded. See? So, I got most of this out. Let’s pop it right up. There she is. And that is heavy. because it is filled with coolant on the inside. So, what I want to do is get this rid of this part, but I want to make sure no matter what I do, I want to save as much coolant as humanly possible. And I’m not usually pretty good at that. I’m pretty terrible at saving coolant. So, you’re going to dump it on the floor. I can’t afford to do that cuz BMW coolant, any German coolant is super expensive. So, I’m going to clamp right here with my unofficial coolant clamping tool. Yeah. Pop this out. Then I’m going to get a cup and put it inside the cup so I save as much as I can. Okay. So I have that one clamped on that side. That’s only finger tight. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That was very uneventful. I like that. Nope. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. So, you’re going to stay up here, but I’m going to tip you cuz I’m not losing any of that coolant. The things you’ll do for like 47 cents. Seriously, this is literally a dollar worth of coolant right here. Would you throw a dollar on the ground? No. Looks tasty. If there’s one thing I love, it’s saving money. Why am I throwing away this beautiful coolant when I could just reuse it for the new heater that I put in? Okay. Did these cars sell well? I don’t think they didn’t initially cuz they were so expensive. So, I think people were just like, “Why would I spend that kind of money on a BMW?” What were they like 40? I think they were like over 50, man. Really? One second. Competition in the Model S. But even still, the Model S had more EV range and it was just a better car. And it’s clear to see That BMW lost money on these cars big time. Oh, definitely. Here’s the pump. And oh, oh, it’s going. How much is in there? Well worth it. That was well worth it, Joey. Well, you spilled half of it on the floor. That’s Yes. But look at this. More importantly, let’s look in here for a second. That is clean. Yeah, those are good. That is It just needs some cleaning up around the bottom, but that’s it, man. The actual contacts are good on the inside there. We’ll take it. I thought we had to replace that cable, but Oh, look in there. See like where the coolant’s been dripping. Oh, right down there. Yep. Yeah, it’s ugly down there, man. Joey. Yo, got the part, big dog. No way. Look at that. Pretty slick, huh? That’s awesome. What are you hiding, Joey? When I tell you this, you promise you can’t be upset. It depends. Now, when I went there, all right, to get this heater, he looked at me and he said, “You’re a handsome, young, smart man.” And boy, do I have a deal for you. I mean, and I am those things. Yes. He said, “For the low price of $900 more than the heater, I could have the car that it came out of.” You did not. Yeah. Are you being serious? Did you drive it here? No. It’s getting It’s getting towed here. Getting towed? It doesn’t run. It’s actually You bought another car. You bought it for more than the other one. Hold that thought. He’s actually out front. You didn’t seriously buy this crap, Joey. Come on. Isn’t it great? You did it. You actually bought another piece of crap. I did. I did, Joey. Come on. It’s not that bad. It’s a good looking car, man. I mean, this one’s a lower trim package, granted, but I think it’s still good looking. Seriously, it’s compact. It’s cool. It’s, you know, it is what it is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this again. Yeah, you’re telling me the tow truck dropped it right here. Yeah, there’s one little problem. It has no title and no key. So, you’re not kidding. Are you being serious? Yeah, it’s it’s a parts car. There’s no title, no key. It doesn’t run. Like, you can’t get it to turn on. Getting this one running would be a lot harder. If we need parts, we have a parts car. We don’t know what’s going on with that car in that shop right now, but having an entirely second car to reference. I’m a genius, Joey. You paid double. You paid almost double. Joey, you know, you’re saying a lot of things right now that are hurting my feelings. One day you’ll realize that. You know what? Maybe, maybe he wasn’t that bad after all. No, no, no. Come back. Come back. Come back. Where you going? Where you going? No, no, no. I’m not doing this. It’s cold. I need help. I’m done. Hey, I need help pushing it inside, man. The wheels all locked up. Yes, I bought a whole another second i3 parts car just to steal one heater module. If this doesn’t work, I might be the dumbest smart person alive. But if it does work, I have a whole second i3 I could fix and sell, making this car free and putting $3,000 in my pocket. directly pours it on the floor. Seriously, that would suck. There’s actually a giant hole in the bottom of it. That’d be awesome. Gotcha. We are almost there. Nice. Let’s get this situated on top. That fits in nicely. That all lines up. All for the price of a car. All for the price of a car. There you go. Okay, it’s in there. Moment of truth to be disappointed. All right. Ready? Yep. Set her up. And here we go. If charging and heat work after the swap, I keep Joey’s 500 bucks. If not, he’s never going to let me hear the end of it. All right, moment of truth. So, we did that. Now, 84. Still cold. Give it a minute. Yay. More air conditioning. It’s still cold. Nice. Um, so you didn’t fix it. I don’t think this needs programming to work, but it’s definitely not it’s definitely not warm what it’s supposed to be doing. You know what? I made a mistake, Joey. Um, I thought that the Rex unit had a coolant loop. So, I thought when the Rex turned on, it could actually heat the coolant to bring to the front of the cabin, but it turns out the only way that this cabin’s heated is with that heater. I can tell it’s cold in here. It’s cold in here. Let’s Let’s shut that off. So, I’m assuming this is because it has zero charge. The charge is 0%. Technically, it should work now. So, if we plug it in and it actually charges, you’re telling me there’s a chance we have heat. Yes. Let’s try it out. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s we do it. Yeah. I know, right? So, good sign that’s lighting up now. That wasn’t lit up before. That’s cool. All right. Let’s see. Blue. Is blue good or is green good? Blue’s good. It’s charging now. One out of two wins. I don’t think you guys understand how awesome this is that this car actually charges. There is actually hope for this thing to run after all. Any kind of number, we should be able to get it. We should be able to check the heat again and have it work cuz I mean I I think you have to be at a certain percentage to get heat. I forgot that this car, the Rex, doesn’t do any of the heat functions in the car cuz it’s a literal scooter motor. So, let’s wait and see. It’s been a couple hours. Here’s the real test. So, uh the charging does work now, which is good. So, it was definitely a high voltage fault. Um, now, for some reason, the heat didn’t work before, but I think it might have to do with the uh battery state of charge. Okay, so now I want to try the heat one more time. Bring up to 84. Get the gun and let’s go. Oh god. Hope that temperature goes up. Please go up. 61. Um, there she goes. Yeah, if she goes up. There we go. Yeah, buddy. Check that out. 99. Yay. That’s good. We got heat, which is awesome. 101. 102. There we go. Yes, the charging works. The heat works. We fixed both major problems today. That is two huge wins for one $500 car. Then we’ll go back. Now we resolve the HV isolation. Get rid of that. Uh, heat not working and won’t charge. These are the big things. Turns out you actually know what you’re talking about. Turns out know what I’m talking about. Every once in a while. Every once in a while. So, now there’s a Rex issue. So, now we have the fuel filled door problem. I think that might be only a that might be a stored code. So, that might not be something that’s um that’s permanent. I’ll have to try to reset that and see what happens. Then we have the engine misfiring, won’t turn on, and crank position sensor issues. So, um, you ordered the parts, though. I did order the parts. Yeah, I did. So, we covered a lot of ground today, guys. We got the heater working. We got the car charging, which are two huge milestones cuz it was doing neither one of those before. Now, we have to figure out why the range extender isn’t working and why it won’t go into the drive. But, I’m sure we’re going to figure that out next episode. Now, I may have added some more complication to the mix by buying a second vehicle, but you know what? It’s all in good fun. In the next episode, I want to accomplish those things, but I also want to get into some root cause analysis as to why this heater failed. See you guys next time.
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I found a $50,000 BMW i3 that the dealer told the owner to scrap. They said it wasn’t worth fixing… so I bought it for $500 and dragged it into the shop to see if that was true.
This is one of the strangest EVs ever made, a carbon fiber electric BMW with a tiny range extender engine, weird cooling systems, and electronics that love to fail. The car wouldn’t charge, wouldn’t heat, and wouldn’t drive… but I had a feeling the dealer might’ve given up a little too quickly.
In today’s video, we dig into the problems, look at the previous diagnosis, chase faults, and see if this “dead” BMW was actually worth saving.
If you like these dead EV rescues, let me know, I might grab even more forgotten electric cars before they’re gone for good
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Rich Rebuilds
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