The BMW E24 6-series is one of those cars with a vast, uncrossable gulf between the values assigned to it by Internet Car Experts and those assigned by Hardbitten Burned-By-Real-World-Purchases Car Experts. The Internet Car Expert has seen an '87 635CSi in nice shape with an asking price of $25,000 on Craigslist, and therefore he knows that even a rough one is worth ten grand, minimum. The Hardbitten Burned-By-Real-World-Purchases Car Expert once paid $2,500 for a fairly solid E24, put $1,500 of parts into it, and sold it for $2,750. The junkyard doesn't lie, and I see E24s in cheap self-service yards all the time, so often that I don't photograph most of them. Today's Junkyard Find, however, has just enough of that Late Malaise Era appeal, with its overtones of imminent Able-Archer 83-triggered nuclear annihilation (plus a manual transmission), that I decided to shoot it.
It's hard to imagine BMW adding these cheezy tape stripes, even back in 1983, but they appear to be factory-applied.
The E24′s guts were pretty much the same as those of the E28 5-series, and so the 6 tended to last for a respectable (for the early 1980s) number of miles.
You don't see many of these cars with manual transmissions, since low-level S&L scammers and white-powder salesmen back then mostly wanted automatic-transmission luxury to go with their German-coupe style.
This one is pretty rusty by Denver standards, so it probably spent some of its life in the Midwest.
181 horses out of this 3.2 liter Big Six engine. That sounds weak these days, but was impressive enough in 1983.
from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com
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