Oh there it is, i got one good little launch out of it before the check engine light came on and see it went away this thing's misfiring, so bad. What a hunk of junk! It's terrible! Welcome to hooves garage, the dumbest automotive channel in all of youtube, and i'd like to present to you, my newest hooptie, a 2008 bmw 135i with a manual transmission. Now i have a love hate relationship with bmws. If you follow this channel for a while, you know that i love to bash on bmws, but roots go actually way back to when this car was built new.

I was actually working at a bmw dealership around the year 2007 2008 and that period of time was a big period of transition for bmw. Of course, the 7 series changed from the beautiful one that i owned to the big blobby version that was packed with too much technology that didn't age very well and that bengal butt era of 7 series trickled down to the 5 series. They got bigger and blobbier, and the 3 series got bigger and blobbier and bmw enthusiasts, especially the ones that love the old e30 chassis. Bmw back in the day, the old ultimate driving machine cars complained that bmw had lost their way and they weren't building a car for old-school.

Bmw enthusiasts again - and this was the answer - the one series which was sized about the same as the outgoing three series, or really a little bigger than the old e33 series, and it came with a basic inline six cylinder engine, the 128 that people loved, but most Including me lusted after this, the 135, which was a twin turbo, inline, six and 300 horsepower in a little bitty car with a manual transmission, basically the best, bmw built in the last decade. I believe is this because the m car, the one series m, was overpriced and over hyped. In my opinion, you could build this car really cheaply in to a 1m and that's exactly what happened to this one. But there is one problem, though i do genuinely believe this is the best bmw made in the last decade, but the bmw engineers couldn't help themselves and the 135.

This n54 twin-turbo engine under the hood is one of bmw's worst in the terms of reliability, but people still love these cars and are totally willing to put up with the headaches and well, i'm gon na find out if it really is worth it now. I bought this one series around november of last year after i had decided to get rid of my clown shoe that i'd owned for a year and never made a video on the clown shoe as cool as it was the engine in it. Just didn't have enough power for my taste, especially on track days, where i need the extra power to make up for my lack of driving skills. So it seemed like the 135 was the perfect choice for me, but i got outbid on cars and bids on a few of them.

I wanted to buy one that hadn't been modified, that i could modify myself in a series of videos and then take out on the track and break it over and over and over again. But this one popped up on cars and bids and it had already been heavily modified. Now when you modify these engines, they get even more fragile and these engines really don't need any help at all totally stock blowing up at 80 or 120 000 miles. This one has 90 000 miles and it is putting out a lot more horsepower than stock.

It has all the modifications of the hood which we'll get to in a little bit short of bolting on bigger, turbos and intakes, and that kind of stuff, and this car has been sitting for a while waiting to come out of winter and get in to track Season and when it arrived, it was working just fine and now well, it's not it's broken so we'll have to go to the car ninja here in a little bit and figure out what's wrong. So what does go wrong with these things? Well, all the classic! Bmw stuff, that you know and love very well, the cooling systems are fragile. The water pumps love to go the vano system. Bmw still can't get that right and that tends to go.

In addition, this car has a high pressure fuel system. Those high pressure fuel pumps are expensive. They love to go the injectors, also love to go. The turbochargers also fail on these left and right, especially when they then mod it like this very expensive.

If they have that wastegate rattle. That is the sound of impending doom. They also have problems with carbon buildup and, as i said earlier, the engines just love to randomly explode. So a really really bad era of bmw engineering.

But the car is apparently so good that people are willing to put up with them and they are so tunable that you can tune these to well over a thousand horsepower. This is basically the new generation 2jz except well, it's made of complete glass but, like i said people put up with this and i'm going to try to discover why. So let's begin a tour of the one series and what in theory makes this car so special and worth putting up with and i'll start with this little book in the back now when i bought this car, i bought it from a relative of the original owner. I guess he bought it and drove it through college and, as you can see, by the paintwork and the wheels it was pretty used and abused.

But initially this was a very special car. Bmw knew that this was something special and all the first owners of the first year of the one series they called it. The year of the one got a special certificate and this leather-bound book talking about well, basically how smart they were for buying this car, and it is a very neat coffee table book for a very special car, but in the 12 or 13 years. Since this bmw has had a lot of wear and tear for 90 000 miles, i think it came from new jersey, which is not where you want to buy a car when it comes to corrosion and wear and tear.

But also it looks like this thing sat outside a lot because well, the paint is fading on the roof. It's oxidized, pretty bad. There's a lot of weather checking all the wheels are chipping and curved. There's a lot of wear in the front of this car as well.

The bumper is peeling and on this passenger side fender, it is all dented up like it was run up against something a very light impact, despite all that, when it arrived, the car drove really really well for a little while until it broke, and i love the Size of this car, it is really the perfect size for a small, sporty coupe. Nowadays, the three series is so big. It's now called the four series, whatever they're called they are now big and bloated and ugly with those grills. I think they're trying to get people to not buy these bmw, sedans and coops anymore with those grills like they want people to buy suvs.

Now i can't think of why they would make the cars ugly on purpose, but this is not an ugly car at all. It is a very classic, bmw look and i have it filled with garbage, but very very nice in here. The coral red seats are a really cool touch, not the sport seats, unfortunately, but this is a pretty low option: car overall, no navigation, just a storage cubby, but overall inside there's a little bit of wear and tear on the interior, but it is in nice shape. Now, under the hood, things get really interesting when it comes to modifications, the previous owner really threw the whole book at this thing from burger tuning.

You can see it has the funky intake here. There's meth injection there's also a speedly limiter put on and a performance tuner an aftermarket, intercooler and charge pipe and aftermarket exhaust and the suspension has been modified as well. It has coil overs. So basically, this thing is built to be better than a 1m and well it is.

The horsepower is estimated at 425 horsepower in this little bitty car and the 1m was only 340 horsepower. You have all the suspension mods to where this thing can handle as well, and it does handle very well. Unfortunately, though, the engine has developed a pretty nasty misfire that actually, i had a hard time trying to figure out what was wrong. I couldn't even get the codes out of it until i figured out how to work this crazy tuning system.

So i'll show you that, as we drive to the ninjas, my bmw mechanic, where we can pull codes and see well, what's going on the exhaust on this thing, does sound really good, but you hear that little rattle. I think that may be the wastegate rattle of death from the turbos, but i don't know yet that's not the problem. I've had with this car, though, before we set off actually the tune in this car is actually really cool and it hacks the fuel gauge for a boost gauge right now. It is showing the fuel about three quarters full, but when you rev it, it turns in to the boost gauge and one half on the fuel gauge is supposed to be 10.

Psi can't really build up too much of a load in my neighborhood, but you can see it actually works as a boost gauge. That's really neat and ingenious. Unfortunately, this tuner also disables the check engine light or basically shows it when something goes wrong and then deletes it and clears the code. So it goes away.

So this thing was misfiring really badly i'll buckle my seat belt. So when i first got this car, it drove great and it was ridiculously fast like unbelievably fast. The only issue that i noticed was the rear. End was a little laundry like some bushings loose back there or a bad alignment, but then about a month in it started misfiring under heavy load.

After a few hard pulls and the check engine light would come on, but then it would disable itself because of the tune, and i couldn't figure out how to get that to shut off through some googling, though i figured it out, but let's see uh, let's see How it does usually the first couple of pulls are: okay, yeah. Oh there it is. I got one good little launch out of it before the check engine light came on and see it went away. I don't know why the tuning company would do this, maybe because they know that you're going to trigger random check engine lights all the time they can just go away and it'll store codes for you.

If you have the app, i downloaded the app and i can't get it to sync to the car. But there is a trick to disable everything and that's to hold the down button and the negative button at the same time which i'm doing now, and that makes the whole screen blank and you can adjust the tunes. So this adjustes it to like full insane mode level, six or you can dial it all the way down to normal. I think level two, but if you leave it in this mode, it'll leave the check engine light illuminated on the dash to get to the mechanics.

So i'll do a hard, pull and that'll leave the code for ninja to verify that it is a misfire. I think i pulled it on my little scanner. It said cylinder three misfire, so hopefully it's just a coil but we'll see there. It is, and now the check engine light will stay on for the ninja's diagnosis.

It really is a shame, because this car had so much power before and now. Well now, it's a total dog. The handling, though, is still absolutely fantastic. The braking this is the ultimate driving machine.

This is what bmw engineers probably envisioned the future to look like, not not the cars we have. Now we have the m2 and the m2cs, i suppose, but it is a little bit of a bigger, more bloated version of this car still really really cool. But i can't imagine the bmw engineers back in the day in its prime envisioned the bmw that we have now this thing's misfiring, so bad, what a hunk of junk! Oh! Thank you! It's terrible! It really is amazing that we, as car enthusiasts, are willing to put up with this amount of abuse when it comes to our cars, because this is just so bad. How can one engine have so many faults, so many gotchas that are just ridiculously expensive to fix, and yet people still worship them and that's i guess what i've built my youtube channel on, but uh.

Let's see what the ninjas thinks he's built his empire on these crappy bmws still in disabled node and there's ninja ninja. Look at it. I, like it, 2008. Bmw.

135I. Are you a fan see this was the dream? Bmw for me back when i was working at the bmw dealership, i thought this was the coolest thing that they made at the time uh, but time has not been too kind to these engines. Yeah, that's true! So how many n54s have you seen blown up in your thing the last year, or so uh, at least like three three yeah? I figured it'd be more in your mechanical history of as a mechanic uh a lot more than that. I lost count to be honest.

Right well, this one's been heavily modified, has 90 000 miles on it right the miles when these things love to blow up yeah, uh, the water or meth injection. Whatever that is, it's been dialed up, it is fast or it it was fast until it started misfiring. It's a total dog at this point, but not a total dog over here. The car trek 456 - it's de-badged mike over at velocity garage, is rubbing on it.

Essentially yeah my badges are gone. Yes, it's been de-badged and compounded, getting polished right now and you're videoing the process, because this thing was a total wreck. After car trek it was a mess yeah. I don't know what you did to it.

Well, it was. It was a lot so after card trick. Airs on velocity garage will be the restoration of the car. Trek 456.

so be sure to subscribe. So you don't miss that. But let's get back to the one series: are you hooking it up? Yes, whoa yeah, the that's! The disabled mode for the tuner, so you can pull codes. So five is like the highest tune mode.

You can dial it down by a thousand rpm on what level of uh crazy. You want. Look at that so cylinder three misfire, most likely it's gon na be a coil. You keep those on hand.

Oh yeah! I got plenty of those. You probably don't go through a day without replacing a coil right, exactly yeah, constant yeah. Why are bmw coils, so finicky or spark plugs yeah? Well, it's not bmw. It's bosch now we're gon na get an email from bar say what the hell are you talking about? Okay, um.

I wonder why what's up delphi uh, the boot is stuck on the spark plug look where it's arcing outside okay, i'm gon na, have to take it and fix it. I'm gon na have to take all this out, so we can fish the uh the boot out. Oh really, yes, so we'll just take a minute. Bmw got the coil out, um, give it a shot, so the one that was missing it's weird, because it's different from the rest of them really the rest of them.

They're all bosch. This one was a delphi, so they replaced it once with the cheaper coil. Is that or just a different one, a different one? Does that mean something else like they were chasing a different problem or well we're going to start with the obvious i mean yeah, so i mean could be an injector could be things, but we always start with obvious and i'm looking at this a valve here. Gasket does not look like too much fun on these engines, not quite no.

No there's the fuel system which injectors go bad. The high pressure fuel pumps go bad, that's what i was looking at the index and you have the lower index, which you are at risk. Yeah, your index is zero, nine and it should be 11 and above all, right well, and each injector, i think, is like 460 bucks a piece. Oh wonderful, yes! Well, i guess we can take this thing out for a spin.

Hopefully it works and i can show you the weird rear, end thingy and you got a pretty good oil leak right here: oil filter, housing and cooler - and this is without doing an inspection. Yet here we go so you hear that little rattle is that the classic wastegate rattle, that's where things start to go bad, charming. How much are turbos, there's like three or four different options? What you want to do with that? You can replace the wastegate, which the kit is only 150 bucks, 180 bucks, i think in 15 hour labor or you can get rebuilt turbos or you can get new ones from bmw new from bmw. I think they're, like three grand a piece.

That's the noises. It's supposed to make yes, it usually. Let me do one pull and then it would just fall on his face. Let's see, you feel that rear end getting a little funny.

Yes, but i think it's from the power it still has traction, though yes you'll feel it again because it it still has the traction it's hooking up, but then the rear end is going cuckoo. Well, i think you fix the misfire. Get lined up straight here. Clear feel that pretty good wow it's got the boost, yeah, so a few more pulls.

It does feel a little weird back. There yeah definitely there's some odd going on in there all right. Well, i'll, just lift her up make sure all the bushings are good. You know and we'll throw in the lemon machine you fixed it.

It has its juice back plenty power, though you got the wrote, rotors kind of purple really yeah, so hot. Yes, it felt fine a little bit the oil here, oil pan that's standard feature on bmws, which, if we decide to do the the turbos i mean that's going to be right. There yeah the exhaust is putting off plenty of heat too. Yes, all right, so my wiggle okay, i'm gon na get a pry bar uh, nothing visual! Well, i get that back.

It's your strat right here! Oh it's leaking! Oh see compared to this one. This is looks brand new. So that's a inconsistent here. So definitely that will will have your rear end messed up well, it does always feel like it kind of falls to the right and then kind of bounces back and forth.

This one is done, yeah yeah all right. Well, that makes sense so not a big deal. I guess very nice and you can you can tell it's an east coast, car huh. Yes, it is uh, definitely a lot of jersey.

I was going to guess new york, all your bushes, they look. Fine, nothing is broken. They responded pretty good, so yeah it has. It has to be the strut right here so rear struts oil leaks, wastegate rattle.

What else? What was that? Oh, you did the coil yeah and the coil yeah. Yes, so ballpark, two greenish, two thousand dollars yeah, that's about the minimum for me on anything i buy. So that's pretty good, of course, i'm gon na take it to the track immediately after and probably totally blow this thing up. Okay, but that's! The whole point is if this car is worth all the headaches, you seem to think so, but you made a living out of it.

So i really don't know it is a cool car, it's great to have the power back for sure. Thank you for watching you.