Was my Repo'd BMW Supercar Sabotaged to make it Impossible to Repair?

hey guys i'm sam crack and i'm determined to figure out the mystery of our great value supercar you see this bmw i8 was flipped back at auction three times over and i'm the last man on that totem pole but at over 70 percent off well how could i lose the quick answer that question is that the bmw dealership that this was last seen by recommended an engine replacement which will cost tens of thousands of dollars but it's really strange because this car seems to run totally perfect that is for about two or three minutes before it begins overheating i started with some at-home diagnosis on the bmw and even after several tests with better than expected results we came up short and trying to find the actual problem here today we'll be taking the car to eurocharged an independent shop in orlando florida and plug it directly into a bmw based diagnostic scanner to see if we can get a better idea of what our failure point is after towing the eye into the shop's parking lot i attracted the attention to someone that was clearly familiar with this car and knew all too much about it [Music] yeah this is it this is the car you know this car we'll hear his full commentary in just a moment now imagine the feeling of driving into a local repair shop and they're familiar with the car before it even gets into their service bay something seems wrong here now i want to thank everyone for their comments direct messages and emails it's really helped shed the light on our overheating issue but there was one very popular theory among all of you and that was that since this car was a prior repossession what are the chances that it was sabotaged what i want to do really quick is pull up the carfax on our i8 it's going to show you how crazy of a life this car oh shoot it's stepmom sam sam coming why is the door locked you better not be in there looking at a new car project one minute mom i'll be right there if you do not open this door i'm just going to check your browser history later 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marks that they installed a water pump we'll investigate that shortly the i8 was then briskly sent back to auction where another dealer purchased and sent it to two independent mechanics before finally sending it to a bmw franchise dealer i've spoken directly to this dealer and they stated that they suggested an engine replacement to the customer but couldn't provide any further details then the car was slid back to auction one last time at least for right now to me but what does all this mean and who would sabotage the car so the idea that someone is getting their baby repossessed and they don't want anybody else to enjoy it but they don't have any choice but to give it back to the finance sores so they go and break something so nobody can ever enjoy it again well i mean it's kind of a good fantasy but it's not generally something that happens a lot where sabotage can't happen is at the auction where somebody on the inside wants to get something like this for a cheaper price so they'll go and generally do stuff that is easy to repair like maybe unplug a connector so the car starts throwing all sorts of codes has a christmas tree lit up on the dash and then has a lower resale value because of the pictures and the auction report that goes along with the car this card he came with a pretty below average auction report so i expected there to be a handful of issues and which i found but the main issue the overheating one uh is one that seems very simple on the surface something that could be something very simple or cheap to fix but something that we're having a heck of a time tracking down so let's go ahead bring this car over to eurocharged orlando plug it into their bmw diagnostic computer and see if we can pinpoint exactly what's going on here engine covers off i'm going to go start it there's a total cold start this hasn't ran all morning so we're going to hear your reaction on what it sounds like now let's see if we can get to ron without going into gear there we go sounds perfectly fine okay the sound is like that all three cylinders on these not eight they sound everything like kind of like a diesel on the ticket noise obviously we don't have the coverage or anything like that but they sound like that that's normal i took an oil sample last night no shavings no nothing like that when you buy an auction car if the oil's like really clean that means they you know but like it was a little dirty so that's good i pulled the plugs a little dirty so they weren't new okay so everything is like good and used you know what we want to see [Music] yeah this is it this is the car you know this car so you heard about this car before yeah this car is online yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not like it's gonna be running for a shop to shop shopping that's this is the car the guy that's saying send a chance for the foot and the auction we pulled the car in the shop and got it up on the lift we did a quick visual inspection by taking some of the under covers off first looking at any of the coolant lines that we could just making sure there was nothing out of the ordinary and we really didn't find anything these guys right here huh this is empty completely right here yeah those aren't the ones that basically is telling you to loosen up okay in the prepared procedure so you can fill it properly okay yeah something like that is that what it said in the manual yeah those two drop that and then vacuum it yeah lowered the car back down and we began with the bleed procedure using the bmw computer i referenced earlier a huge benefit of using the computer while running the bleed procedure is that it tells you exactly what to do when to do it it monitors how many times you rev it so you don't overdo things or under do things all while showing the cooling temperatures live so you can really see how the car is behaving i got to tell you stephen if we were doing this on like a ferrari or something we would have died from the carbon monoxide but we're being environmentally friendly doing this in a bmw i8 i don't smell anything from that little three cylinder now the coolant temperatures just continue to rise and rise the first time we did it all the way up to 117 degrees celsius that's the magic number where the diagnostic computer will actually shut off the bmw i8 so that no major harm is done [Music] the fact that that coolant temperature consistently rose up to that 117 degrees and we also verified a rising cylinder head temperature using a laser thermometer likely rules out the idea that our coolant temperature sensor is bad the next step here was to investigate whether our thermostat was operating properly now the thermostat is actually very simple to get to into this car you just take the passenger side rear wheel off and then you can reach in between the frame and the engine and there's four bolts that hold the housing in place so here is our thermostat and thermostat housing that comes apart from the water pump but you can only order it as an assembly with the water pump so we're trying to figure out exactly how this works we're going to run some water in it to show you guys but a big thing here if this is installed incorrectly these notches have to line up or else it won't function properly and that's where the turn comes in that's right that's right i'm wondering that's going to be really funny to see if that fixes this car for real yep let's say they tried to fix it um non specialized let's say bmw that doesn't have the proper prepared procedure tool and they don't know what they're doing they're just gonna put it like yeah just shove it back in they do it like i would do it right but but no that's why i brought it to you you see the water in there another way to visualize this if these notches aren't lined up exactly perfect if i turn this a little bit the water will just run out or it could get jammed closed on our carfax it states that a shop replaced the water pump it's much easier again to get the thermostat out of the car than it is to get the entire water pump out of the car it's much smaller and just much simpler to access so there's a possibility that maybe the shop just uninstalled thermostat like we're doing here and put it back in without actually referencing the shop manual and did it out of alignment maybe it's just jammed shut to the temperature that we don't want to get [Music] allow the vehicle to go down and carry out service function again how much time ever we have we've been running right now almost 10 minutes almost 10 yeah it's similar to last time yeah but the last time we start uh a 70-something degrees you see where i'm going i do see where you go but this is unscientific that's my issue yeah it's very unscientific stephen yeah because we're getting the same outcome no matter what we start at you're right so i i'm thinking this because i think oh my gosh look at this hold on i mean coolant is cooling is boiling out of the tank and it's closed so this is the only thing again i i don't know if you've got to go home or whatever which is totally cool thermostat pull yeah definitely i want to do that i mean if that doesn't fix anything then we really know we're up against a very strange issue yeah yeah i'm like down for that now okay let's do it all right it's out a second time two times in one day and all we're going to do is just we're just going to slip that the spring off yeah let's do basically honda style honda style yeah take all the spring of the thermostat that's it at all times and see where we go from there man that makes a difference all right owners that haven't overheated issues yes come to eurocharge orlando they will do a thermostat delete for you the best modification for any i8 owner i would like to let you know steven's dedication to the i8 it's now been dark for hours everybody uh except for earth is gone and we've got the thermostat out we're gonna vacuum bleed this one more time and then we're gonna run the car and it's not going overheat right it's not going to overheat anymore you know what i say i say if it overheats right i got to get home okay what car do i take the c63 or the m4 well you should take this the m4 right yeah i heard it's got a brand new drive shaft got a brand new driveshaft and soon to be like 700 700 horse yeah yeah i'm taking the m4 yes like the fuel tank ran out how many degrees are we at we was 102 for like it was for like two like almost three minutes it was like a hundred and two steady it was 100 300 do it on the 11th minute so on the bmws right that commonly overheat and the failure is is a water pump a common failure in general on bmw right yeah i mean the like yeah i mean every model like uh it's mostly most of the time it's like m55s and m54 everything that has like electronic cooling pump mm-hmm like they failed a lot is it the thermostat that fails though or the water pump most of the time there's still a water pump and is it a physical failure like the the impeller breaks apart or what no it's just electronically electronic internally like basically the electronic part is like goes out all right big thanks earth brought us uh some gas full got 73 miles of range steven is resetting the uh procedure here topped off the overflow tank which went down a little bit we're doing it again for several minutes it's been saying between like 102 and 103 without the thermostat in we're about 10 minutes in to the 20 minute procedure again i mean before it was shutting off right around now right 10 minutes in oh yeah so maybe it has is having some effect i don't know this is just like the strangest thing ever such a simple idea turned into something complicated what we got here it's hard to see but you can hear it it feels like almost like popcorn is popping in here it's boiling could it be the fan you know how like fans got two speeds low and high it looks like it's low all the time you know just a couple clicks on the bmw computer steven was able to force our fan into that high speed mode so we could verify that the fan was indeed working properly this also rules out another potential failure point for us but after a few more minutes during this bleed procedure well it overheated again hey tom hi all right calling it for the night thank you very much for your help no problem but we're not done we're coming back so strange do some research sometimes you know it it's best to do a little bit of digging stop take a breather you wanna like when you're on top of the car and you they're like you've been like trying to figure out something now your brain goes yes so it's best to take a rest yeah for sure hit a crack pipe and then come back after this test everybody went home for the night and steven took home the shop computer with him because he was perplexed at what was going on here he did some digging and he found a sub article on bleeding the i8 in the sub article it states that for the i8 you must bleed it for a minimum of 30 minutes and then it gives you the specifications at where the vacuum should be in the system this is something we hadn't done all along and to make sure we did this procedure as effective as possible i went and got a different what i think to be a better designed vacuum for the coolant system you see our old vacuum system worked off of a set of grommets that sealed with rubber on rubber contact this new setup seals with a regular overflow tank cap that you hook up directly to an air line so there's really no way we can lose any air if you go back and look at when we were playing a vacuum with our old device there would be a little bit of crackling and popping coming out of the overflow tank even after a minute or two of vacuuming i can only assume that cracking and popping is some air bubbles coming to the surface with our new vacuum after a minute or two of it running the water was still as could be so again we got a step in the right direction so before with the other uh vacuum bleeder we were using remember it almost was like popcorn yeah just pop pop pop now this is just kind of sitting here steady and you know it's aerating this water so we've got this running for about 10 minutes i'd say we're going to leave it on at least another 10 20. fulfill the hour long i8 bleeding procedure now is the vacuum okay vacuum's holding so now now we got to open this they open that oh wait you open that so is it sucking [Music] [Laughter] so the coolant is already rising to 104 which is uh not great the thermostat should open another strange thing though is that this time around first of all we don't have any crackling or bubbling going on in the overflow tank that's a really good sign but the fan's not kicking on now we've obviously had the fan on before but you'd think it would kick on with the coolant temperatures getting higher this is really weird because this is the first time i've seen this with the car engine getting over temp and not crackling and bubbling eventually the system hit 117 degrees celsius the diagnostic computer shut the engine off again and even though it seemed like we had made a little bit of progress here i felt completely defeated i've never had this much trouble diagnosing a cooling system it's one of the strangest things i've ever encountered but to make matters even weirder we had a totally unexpected blowout you see the vacuum kit that i bought came with the simple pressure tester this little ham pump will connect to the special cap that fits over your overflow tank it will pressurize your system and if you've got a leak somewhere it will push some of the coolant out of that area so that it's easier to see and you can figure out what you need to replace well when we hooked the pump up to the i8 after just a few little pumps i heard a boom and then a bunch of coolant dropped out of the front end of the car we thought maybe a hose popped off but all the hoses were still connected it literally blew up the radiator you see right here where the plastic tank meets the metal fins it just split right there stephen what did you do here i blew up the radiator at least you admit it yeah all right we're getting a new radiator we're gonna throw it in maybe even a water pump thermostat what do you think you think that's gonna make any difference i mean i probably blew up the radiator but we probably have a blockage in there i'll probably save you some money like fixing it or anything like that you see hey that's the that's the positive way of looking at it so if something blew up something is wrong over a few days time we've probably got over 24 hours worth of diagnosis into our i8 and while it doesn't seem like the picture is any clear there are few little changes like the water getting hot in the overflow tank like the temperatures coming down slightly before rising that tells me we still have an air pocket somewhere in the system it's the only thing that's really logical to me at this point now we obviously also have a blown radiator that needs to get fixed but why do we have a radiator that just blew up on us during a common pressure test that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and that's where i wonder is there a blockage in this system what was the blockage caused by and it goes back to the sabotage theory we won't really know until we pull the radiator out of the car which is what we're going to do up next got to take the entire front end of this car off to get to that radiator and another quick note the radiator on the i8 has been revised if not once i think twice by bmw now parts revisions happen all the time it doesn't mean that we've got a faulty part but sometimes part revisions happen because there are defective parts so be really interesting to see once we install our new radiator and while we're at it for good measure i ordered a brand new overflow tank cap because our pressure release valve kept getting stuck in the expansion tank and i ordered a new water pump and thermostat by the time we install all of the main cooling system components together and we take a couple extra measures while we're doing the vacuum procedure to make sure all the air is out of this system and the cars bled properly will all right work again why i sure hope so and if you do as well be sure to hit that like button now if you're not already following me on instagram or i've been posting updates to the bmw i8 project there before anything goes live here on youtube just go right here click the link in the description box guys i want to thank each and every one of you for watching today and i'll catch you very soon you

Channel: Samcrac

Views: 1,465,173

Rating: 4.886858 out of 5

Keywords: BMW, i8, VPN, overheating, samcrac, samcracc, salvage, rebuild, auction, car, cars, automotive, hybrid, ev, electric car, tesla, supercar, hypercar, super car, i3, fast, mechanic, mechanical, repairs, rebuilt, diagnose, thermostat, water pump, crashed, wreck, amg, m5, m3, m6, v8, twin turbo, turbo, turbocharged, supercharged, swap, LS, coyote

Id: ijDj17kcIqw

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020