Oh my. I am not happy starting this article with this photo. But it is the teaser photo I used to end last week’s post on snow removal, and I promised to pick up the story by discussing some of the downsides of modern municipal snow removal practices. Namely, you guessed it, rust. Let’s just say that if you’re willing to stick with this tale, there’s a happy ending. Or at least the promise of a happy ending.
All things considered, I think that the daily driver is still looking pretty good for being 16 years old. This photo was taken not long ago, shortly after the annual mounting of the winter wheels and snow tires. I waited later in the season this year to do that (December, I believe) since winter weather here in New England was so late in appearing. But as I discussed last week, snow did eventually arrive and with it all of the work necessary to clear that snow – both by me on my driveway as well as by professionals on public roads.
Snow predicted after midnight tonight…we are thoroughly brined by noon today.
One of the modern techniques in municipal snow and ice clearing is the pre-treatment of roads before a storm. For environmental and fiscal reasons pre-treatment with some sort of melting-agent is desirable instead of just blanketing roads with tons of rock salt. Pre-treatment is typically effected by applying a “brine” on the road prior to the arrival of snow and/or ice. Unfortunately, for the roads on which I most often drive, the brine that is used is pretty much what it sounds like, liquid salt. This is as opposed to less corrosive pre-treatments such as beet juice, beer/fermentation waste, or even cheese-making byproducts. (Blessed are the Cheesemakers or in fact “any manufacturers of dairy products.”) The Commonwealth of Massachusetts utilizes brine made of sodium chloride (rock salt) and magnesium chloride on state-maintained roads. Individual towns can of course use what they want on their local roads, but beet/beer/cheese juice are likely rather rare here, so corrosive salts it is.
It’s no coincidence that driving in this stuff results in all manner of automotive rust. Arguably that magnesium chloride is even more corrosive than regular salt. Lucky me to live in a state that favors the use of lots of sodium chloride (regular salt) along with magnesium chloride. The end result is that my winter driving brings forth a considerable amount of automotive rust. The above picture is what those innocent bubbles in the lede picture look like on the inner edge of my car’s hatch.
The winter crud doesn’t just seep into unseen automotive crevices. It does do that of course, but it also over time finds ways to simply eat right through the paint on exterior surfaces. This is what it did to my MINI. This particular blemish grew much larger before I eventually got it repaired.
A similar thing has happened to the tailgate on the other daily driver at my house, the 2006 Highlander. I have had similar spots on the 1976 Volvo wagon. That vehicle barely gets driven in the winter at all, for what should by now be obvious reasons. Nevertheless, rust sprouted up all around its tailgate window the second winter that Hans (the Volvo) came out East from its former home in New Mexico. The Volvo’s tailgate got replaced a few years ago. The Highlander will likely benefit from a similar repair in a year or so. Right now, our Honda Fit’s tailgate has not started to visibly rust, but given that the Fit currently lives in far upstate New York, I’m thinking that I’ll see rust on it come one of its visits home in the not too distant future. I even know where that rust will appear — right below the flimsy piece of plastic that contains the hatch release mechanism. This just seems to be a fact of life here in the House of Only Cars That Have Tailgates.
I just noticed while writing this article, that I’ve not had a vehicle that had a conventional trunk since about 2000 when I sold my Nissan SE-R. Even then, that car shared a garage with a Saturn SW2, a different Volvo wagon, and ultimately a minivan. No trunks there. For some reason, nearly all the visible rust on vehicles over here has been restricted to the tailgates. Coincidence, or what? I really have no idea.
Both the Highlander and the Volvo 245 have benefited from having their under-bodies serviced with one of those “you need to do it every year” oil undercoating treatments. This has performed well on the Volvo’s frame and floors (but remember, that car really doesn’t get driven in the winter). The Toyota is an absolute rust magnet and seems to developing some rust despite the rust treatment. I’m convinced that I could keep it immersed in a vat of oil most of the year and it would still rust. I’ve seen nothing like it since the cars of the 1970s that I used to own…in the 1980s…before they all rusted away.
You can see in this picture some of the general surface rust that clings to nearly every under body surface on that vehicle. Brake jobs always require doses of PB Blaster (or Kroil oil…name your poison).
Not an artifact from the Titanic. Just a Toyota rear brake after riding around in Central Massachusetts for 10,000 miles.
I am on the fourth set of brake calipers on the Highlander as they need to be changed just about every other brake job. Yeah, the whole caliper. As a related matter, I’m now deciding if I’m going to bother rebuilding the completely disintegrated parking brake assembly since doing so will require replacement of the rear brake dust shields, which are a pain to do but currently look kind of like large pieces of brown Swiss cheese. My mechanic – who I bring vehicles to when I’m too lazy/untalented/angry to repair myself — says “Don’t bother”. He’s the guy who also gives me my annual inspection stickers, so I tend to take his word for stuff like this.
Getting back to my BMW daily, here’s that car’s rear subframe at 200,000 miles, once it was pulled for replacement. That was 30,000 miles ago.
One could basically just break pieces off of it by hand. I did.
Here’s the replacement before it was wire-brushed, repainted, and installed.
It’s hard to tell from my photos just how big a hunk of steel this particular piece of BMW is. You can get a better sense from the parts diagram. So, 180,000 miles of riding around in the Northeast – my car had 20,000 miles on it when I bought it – and you get to “you can break pieces off of it by hand”. Yikes.
Now that I can also break off pieces of the car’s tailgate by hand (still works/opens-closes just fine though…), it occurs to me that maybe this too should be addressed.
Replacing the tailgate on a so-equipped car is really not challenging so much as it is awkward. When I did it on the Volvo I was able to accomplish the whole task myself by employing a step ladder as a brace for holding up the gate as I bolted the replacement into place. On a Volvo 245, there are exactly eight bolts that need to be removed in order to release the tailgate from the body. Well, four if you don’t care about the high likelihood of breaking the hinges. That would be ill advised since the hinges are actually more valuable (harder to find) than the tailgate itself. On an E91 BMW, there are only four bolts… period… holding the tailgate on. This ought to be a piece of cake.
The bigger challenge for my car’s tailgate job was in finding one that was in good shape, and because I am an inveterate cheapskate about these sorts of things, in the correct color. When I did the Volvo’s tailgate, I had a local tech school’s auto shop department paint the replacement from the chocolate brown it was to the basic white that I needed it to be. It turned out quite well. I’m not a perfectionist, but asking the 17 year olds to tackle the Monoco Blau metallic paint on my car that seemingly changes color depending on the ambient light was more than I could reasonably expect. Short of shelling out for a professional paint job – which if done properly would need to be blended into the rest of the 16 year old paint on my car, which in turn would really call for a whole car paint job – the best solution would be to find another 16 (or close) year old Monoco Blau metallic hatch.
I do love a challenge.
Oh look. There’s one.
Actually, this car is a year older and mechanically different from mine. The found car is an X-drive (AWD) with an automatic. Mine is a RWD 6speed. Mine has a different interior package, different upholstery, etc. But where things counted for me, exterior color and condition, it’s a match! The hatch itself is interchangeable on E91s from 2004 through 2008. This 2007 donor car had some relatively minor damage, as we’ll see in a moment, to the right front end; but a 17 year old BMW that needs a new fender and probably some front suspension bits is a refrigerator waiting to be made. This poor wagon (I could tell it had been owned by friends-of-dogs since it had dog toys still in the rear seat) had been totaled but was well on its way to saving a number of other cars. Its whole drivetrain and front subframe had already been pulled and sold. Selling me the undamaged rear hatch was pure gravy for the fine folks at the salvage yard. The price reflected that. $200 and it was mine.
Except unlike the disassembler in Pennsylvania that I purchased my subframe from (also a stellar deal for an undamaged low mileage part), the folks at this salvage yard do not ship parts. Plus, figuring out how to ship a tailgate without damaging it would be a challenge to anyone. Nope, I quickly realized that the easiest thing would be to pick it up myself.
Pick it up myself from its location in North Carolina, not far from the South Carolina line.
As I noted in my COAL, my car actually came from the Research Triangle area of North Carolina in 2010. So in a way a road trip to North Carolina to bring home rescue parts would be fitting. In this case I’d be traveling to a very different part of North Carolina, a location that I last went through in a diesel Chevette in March 1983. The car from that trip looked much like the one from this CC article, except it was a diesel and had hard vinyl upholstery for added discomfort. In 1983, the trip was a spur of the moment decision (like, literally I was asked, said yes, and hit the road in about 15 minutes) to blast from Western Massachusetts to Fort Jackson in Columbia, SC to witness a colleague’s daughter graduate from Army basic training. Clearly I’ve been up for this kind of impromptu multi-state road trip for most of my driving life.
In the presence of all of those military inductees – most of whom were the same age as me — somehow even that manilla envelope seemed scary at the time.
As a college student in 1983, attending and soon to graduate from a college that culturally was about as antithetical to the practice of military service as one could get, I’ll just say that whole trip was surreal. 48 hours in a diesel Chevette was the least of the surreal aspects. I should probably just leave it at that. Unless there are any CC readers who are alumnae of my college, in which case, Hi!
This time, the surrealism was supplied by a New Jersey Turnpike advertisement for the arrival of robotically-created crafted yogurt. While not up to 1983-standards, the whole idea of eating something created by these kind of bossy-looking, strangely hyper-sexual, robots still freaked me out considerably.
The “crafting” is apparently done in this vending machine, which incredible silliness aside, is as fascinating to me as all vending machines are. The machine itself (let’s just forget about the irritating robots) reminds me of the Sinclair Dinoland Mold-A-Rama machines. My unconfirmed suspicion is that the yogurt probably tastes like the product of a Mold-A-Rama machine.
Don’t ask…I was like 4 years old, ok?
Additional minor league surrealism included the realization that we here in the U.S., nearly a quarter of the way into 21st century, have apparently decided to entirely forego the grammar and punctuation associated with a thousand years of linguistic tradition. Or as my more rigorous friends who live in my head would say, “rules”.
Having spent most of the past 44 years living in the Bay State but regularly driving for one reason or another to the DMV (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) area, the idea of driving halfway down the Eastern Seaboard seems like basically a drive to the grocery store. I’ve done the drive from Massachusetts to DC literally more times over the past 40 years than I can count. While I do it less often now than I did when my parents were still around, I still make it down there at least a couple of times a year to visit friends or go to work-related meetings.
A very close friend since the Ford administration now lives in Northern Virginia. Not that either of us were in the Ford administration (you needed to be at least in high school to be in the Ford administration), but this seems a better way of keeping track of vast expanses of time than the metric of “dog’s years”. Less math. Anyway, Northern Virginia is often about halfway between where I am and where I need to be. In this way, the trip to North Carolina for a BMW tailgate could include a handy and enjoyable midpoint stop…and the chance to drag my friend into a 10 hour round trip car ride to a junkyard.
Friends of mine tend to get used to these sorts of “opportunities” as they’ve been available since the Carter administration, when I learned how to drive.
I am a frequent-enough visitor to the home of the fine folks in Reston that the cat knows that I know where his food is, and when he expects to be let out.
After a completely routine drive to DC, and an enjoyable dinner, I let the cat out and we hit the road for Hoffman, NC. Arriving around mid day, the donor 2007 E91 was located. In fact, I just wanted to see it but didn’t need to. The tailgate had already been removed as I’d paid for it over the phone. The only down-side of this junkyard visit is that I’d really have liked to have wandered around the yard, but I’d committed to getting my friend back home within the day and myself back to Massachusetts the following day. So there wasn’t actually time to dally. In my haste, I neglected to really scour the donor for useful bits and pieces. For example, I forgot to pull the left front door seal. I need a better one and these things cost ridiculous money new from BMW. I’m sure I could have gotten it off of the donor for free or certainly very cheap if I’d remembered. I did manage to scoop up both side view mirror caps/shells as those are always useful. I also needed a new front-half inner right fender liner, but clearly this car’s damage precluded acquiring that.
Actually, that fender liner that I needed may be what’s crushed under the front bumper. Oh well, those things are always trashed in junkyards.
I know that when it comes to damage assessment on wrecked cars, looks can be deceptive; particularly if the looking is done by an amateur like me. Still, knowing that a car wound up in the junkyard with as little external damage as this one is sobering. It seems that these cars (or any car) are so expensive to fix that a relatively minor accident can really result in totaling if the owner is not persistent or motivated. I don’t know how many miles are on this thing, but given the condition (pre-accident) it is almost certainly less than mine. This is something I think about constantly given the nearly daily observance of fender benders caused by inattentive drivers.
The moral seems to be that rust I can obviously deal with, but even a few thousand dollars of body damage may well turn out to be a whole other thing.
Anyhow, the yard guy and I soon retrieved the already removed tailgate from storage.
And after an interesting janky ride with it bungie-corded on top of the equally janky Subaru that they keep riding around the property in…
The new-old tailgate is in fact perfect aside from some dust. There are a few scratches on the spoiler, but if those don’t buff out sufficiently, I’ll just replace it with the one on my current tailgate. It’s just plastic, so there’s no rust there.
…we got the thing into what will be its forever-home and hit the road back to Virginia.
Of course, one does not travel to North Carolina – even if it’s for less than a day – without a stop for barbecue.
Each of the things on that plate are prepared in a manner unique to this particular bit of North Carolina geography. Even the cole slaw. The same of course can be said for the authentic local barbecue anywhere in the U.S. That’s the very specific magic of barbecue. Drawing equally from the cuisines of our indigenous peoples, immigrants both involuntary and voluntary, and random unknown contributors with ideas from beyond our shores, barbecue is unquestionably our national/native food. That’s why it’s my mission to try it all.
As an expatriate North Carolinian, I hold a special spot for Piedmont or Lexington-style Carolina barbecue.
And hushpuppies. Always hushpuppies.
There was also time for a bit of Curbside image-grabbing. This VW Fox GL wagon caught in traffic was one of the cleanest I’ve seen in years; not that I’ve seen more than a handful in recent years since they were abundant, new, and cheap in the late 1980s. Perhaps this Fox was a more recent import from Brazil, which could be what the sticker on the tailgate was all about. If it’s a legit sold in America version it couldn’t be newer than 1990, after which the GL wagon was discontinued here. For a 34 year old car, that tailgate is in great shape. Clearly it’s been largely un-brined. If anything ever happens to the rest of the car, I sure hope that another Fox wagon owner will be able to salvage that part for their most likely very rusty Fox.
So I say in my honorary role as self-assigned patron saint of rusty tailgates.
After a second night in Virginia, I released my friend from road trip duty, let the cat out, and hit the road back home.
Where soon enough the new-old part could take up residence in my garage until installation.
I’ve decided that installation will wait a few months for a couple of reasons. First, the old tailgate is still doing its tailgate duty. It’s not pretty – particularly when you look at the inner parts that are invisible from the exterior of the car – but why put a rust-free part on a car to drive around in the brine and road salt any earlier than necessary? If I can get one more full winter out of the existing tailgate, then I can let this new part get a leg up on surviving the briny winters for hopefully many more years.
The second reason is revealed in the above picture. In a random act of mechanical cruelty, BMW engineered the wiring that goes into the hatch without any kind of expected block or terminal connectors. Even Volvo figured out a better way of doing this back in 1976. Instead, all of these wires in the BMW are home runs from well inside the body of car to their termination at things like tail lights, antennas, the wiper motor, etc. in the tailgate. When it comes to replacing the E91’s tailgate, if you take your time to do the job correctly, you disconnect each wire from its termination in the tailgate and pull it out through the various channels and gaskets leading back into the body of the car. On the other hand, if you’re working at a junkyard, you take something like hedge clippers to whack the harness in half where it exits the body and let the new owner deal with it. Thus, while there may only be four bolts holding the hatch onto the car, there are well more than a dozen wires that need to be carefully removed from the old tailgate, repaired as necessary (they’re notoriously fragile and mine have been spliced multiple times already), and then fed carefully into the new gate. Bolting-wise, it’s a 10 minute job. Wiring removal/reinstallation could take a while, during which time I won’t be able to drive the car or even close the hatch. Definitely not something to do during the winter, at least not in my crowded and cramped garage.
So this gives me yet another project in queue for Spring. Or Summer, depending what other things around here decide to break down and demand fixing. There’s always something, and if “things” are driven around on New England roads, there’s a good chance that rust will have something to do with the job. All of which I’m fine with so long as the repair also promises some connection to barbecue and a road trip.
So let me get this straight, you removed a 1st class corrosion protection primer (the black KTL coat on the subframe) by wire-brushing and then repainted it?
Well, to be a bit more accurate in my description, what I did was to wire brush off the surface rust on the replacement subframe and then touch up those spots with a rust-inhibiting paint. But my larger point is that all of these things rust in these conditions. I’ll take your word on the KTL coating and how it may be first class…but given the state of my original subframe which I would assume came from the factory with the same coating, it doesn’t seem exceptionally protected.
I was actually advised by some to powder coat the replacement subframe, but I was in a hurry (and perennially short of funds) so I didn’t do that. I guess if my car makes it to 400K miles, I’ll look into doing that on the next subframe.
Hey Jeff,
cataphoretic dip coatings are the best primers around. You dip the whole chassis and achieve even thickness and complete coverage (all crevices). They are somewhat ductile even at low temperatures, but there is only so much abuse through rocks etc. that any material that’s a couple of micrometers thick can take before chipping.
If you really, really, *really* wanted to make it completely rust-proof, you’d hot dip galvanize it, put a chromate conversion treatment on it, have a cataphoretic dip coating applied, paint it and then put on some gummy chipping protection.
Our country also use road salt in the winter which meant all cars became rusty after only a few years. It was just a matter of fact for years and years.
This has turned when cars got better rust protection, starting from the 90s onwards. Rusty cars are rare now.
Still, my 20 year old car needed new sills a year ago. This was not visible from the outside because it has plastic oversills. The rear subframe looks bad, covered in rust. Not as bad as yours though, that was downright scary and lethal!
Thanks for a nice story, love the roadtrip details as well.
Thanks Dion!
My car actually came from BMW with a 12 year rust warranty. So naturally, I took it in to BMW for them to have a look at that subframe at almost the 12 year old point as it was starting to look just about as bad as in the picture in my post (which was taken when the car was around 13 years old…so about a year after BMW saw it). The pronouncement from BMW was that “it was fine” and no warranty claim would be possible because it hadn’t “fully rusted through”. That seemed pretty crappy to me, although as most owners of The Ultimate Driving Machine know, “crappy” is the expectation around anything related to the dealer. I could have tried to take this up the chain to BMWNA, but figured that fighting them about an almost warranty-expired car would be more trouble than I needed…and thus started looking for a new(er) subframe to just fix the problem.
They of course wished that my solution would be to start looking for a new BMW…but as much as I like this one, I can state with absolute confidence that there will never be a new BMW in my future.
So yeah, cars are generally much much better nowadays re. rust for sure…but as our experiences show, it still happens no matter what.
“Bossy, strangely hyper-sexual robots”
Ok, you win. That’s the internet comment of the day and I don’t need to read anything else.
Very enjoyable writeup, and the type that makes this site. It takes more enthusiasm, creativity, and energy than I have to make a cross-country trip for spare car parts. Congratulations on keeping that lovely BMW on the road and thanks for bringing us along.
Thank you Petrichor!
BTW, this type of salt use is making my search for a used GS350 AWD very difficult. 90% of the California cars are RWD for obvious reasons. The AWD ones were owned in your neck of the woods. And dealerships don’t photograph rear subframes. Audis are almost defacto AWD, so it’s not hard to find examples that have never seen salt.
try Denver. Plenty of awd GSs there.
Here in Virginia, we’re expecting 2” of snow overnight, so the State has been busy brining the roads. This snowstorm (yes, 2” qualifies as a ‘storm’ in this part of the country) caught me by surprise, so I drove our 29-year-old Thunderbird to work yesterday on recently brined roads, which is something I try to avoid. I’ve come to loathe that brine, since VDOT seems to bathe roads in the stuff whenever there’s a hint of snow in the forecast – and frequently that snow never materializes. Grr.
Enough with the rant – this was enjoyable to read. And I’m impressed at how well the tailgate fits into the back of your car too. Definitely a worthwhile trip – and good luck with the wiring harness.
I like the Fox wagon – I used to see a Fox wagon roaming around here, but it was a darker-colored one, so it’s not the same car. I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.
Funny about the hush puppies – just this weekend we took a friend out to dinner because she’s moving back to Germany and wanted a uniquely American meal while she could still get such a thing. So we took her to a seafood restaurant where we had soft-shell crabs… and hush puppies (which she’s never had before). Excellent stuff.
However, as a fellow expatriate North Carolinian, I admit I actually prefer the vinegary Eastern NC barbecue to Lexington-style bbq, though really, having either at this point would make my day. When I lived in Greensboro or the Raleigh-Durham area I considered the 1- or 2-hour drive to Wilson or Goldsboro for dinner to be perfectly sensible for the bbq.
Thanks Eric. Absolutely, the worst thing is the brining when no snow materializes. That’s by the way exactly what happened the evening after I took that picture. No snow. Grrrrrrrr. But I understand the situation. At some point someone has to call it and send out the trucks…and then the weather does what the weather does.
Believe me, I tested the fit of the tailgate in the back before committing to go pick it up. I used the old Volvo tailgate (which I still have, of course) to check the fit after measuring and figuring out the Volvo gate was a bit larger than the BMW gate. Sort of like an extreme version of “measure twice and cut once” (because sometimes I measure twice and STILL get it wrong).
Hush puppies are definitely a below-the-Mason-Dixon line thing. I recall an all-you-can-eat fried fish place that my family frequented in the Raleigh area when I was a kid. All you can eat hush puppies were divine.
Great article, these rust war stories make for interesting reading for those of us who don’t deal with it. Though I was raised on Lexington style BBQ, I have to say I now prefer Eastern NC style better (though I partake of BBQ only sparingly these days). Wilson and Goldsboro are indeed top sources. When you talked about the promise of a happy ending, though, I thought this article was going to be about something else entirely.
No, we’ll leave that to the robots.
I’m sure you miss the tailgate of the Saturn SW2…
Ha! The fact that the Saturn’s body panels didn’t rust may be the only thing I miss from the Saturn.
Growing up in the mid-west where winters were long and snowy (most of the time) with lots of road salt, it was such a common site for me to see so much rust that I never thought much about it. Nor did I think much about the vehicles that seemed to be white most of the winter from the layer of salt. I had always heard of those “rust free” cars from the southwest, but they seemed to be a unicorn for us. Almost like a story you heard over and over but knew it wasn’t true.
Then in 2010 I moved to southern California. Then as now, I go back to the mid-west at least twice a year to visit friends and family. At first, I truly didn’t notice the cancer ridden vehicles there or the extra clean/solid (rust free) vehicles here. However, seeing the rust free cars is similar to breathing now and I don’t realize it until I get back home. Now it jumps out at me how much rust and deterioration the vehicles back there have.
I hear you. It wasn’t until I got this New Mexican Volvo that I have that I truly understood how much time and effort I’ve spent over the years fighting rust and busting knuckles on rusty hardware. Aside from decades of red dust (it was a desert car so there is sand in that car in every place where sand can be), I can simply put a wrench to that car and remove things. Just like in a Youtube video!
In spite of, or because of the rust, all the makings for an enjoyable read; a mission, the open road, a reliable car, good friend, good food, and a junk yard. Can it get any better?
However, I do disagree with one (fantasy?) statement; “on an E91 BMW, there are only four bolts… period… holding the tailgate on. This ought to be a piece of cake”.
Nothing is a piece of cake.
Thanks
Besides driving in winter weather, it’s the Massachusetts’s climate that is the problem. The humidity is so high there, that everything is dripping wet, all the time. Some of the rust pictures are evidence of that, humidity in the air causing metal surfaces to rust. Even vehicles garaged in Mass are going to rust, unless the garage is heated and dehumidified. If one heads west, around the western quarter of Kansas, the humidity drops, and then further west, the rust issue is minimized. I think living in the eastern United States, all vehicles will rust away, it’s a certain death for metal. .
The huge temperature swings in the eastern half of the country don’t help either. Some days in March it will get up to 60 degrees while the garage is still at 30; as soon as I open the door, everything from the ceiling down gets wet as that warm air rushes in.
But that’s nothing compared to the salt. I don’t think Michigan uses much of the brine, but the salt’s bad enough. My poor old 2012 Focus is a couple years away from being rusty enough that I’ll want a new car. I don’t embarrass easily, but I don’t like looking like I don’t take care of my stuff. I’ve done bodywork on it (and had some done by others, as well), but after a while, there’s just no stopping it.
Good for you for keeping yours going for a few more years, Jeff.
I think it’s almost all the salt. It’s drippy wet here in Oregon for 6 months out of the year, and cars don’t rust from that (with some very minor exceptions, and then it’s invariably superficial). But get within a 1/4 mile of the coast, and the salt spray in the air eats them alive, from the outside in.
For that matter, when I was a kid in Iowa in the early 60s, they did not use salt, but just plowed. Even older cars were not visibly rusted like they would be 10 years later.
Salt is the enemy.
I have to agree with Paul, based only on my own small data set.
Of the 3 cars I mention in my article, the Volvo is standing up best to rust because it’s not actually driven (other than maybe just every 6 weeks or so to keep things moving internally…and always on dry days when there’s no snow on the roads). OTOH, it does get stored outdoors, covered, and hence gets moisture. That moisture alone doesn’t cause that much of a problem without the salt accelerating the rust.
When we first got the Volvo, it was driven in the winter and started sprouting some rust (e.g., on the tailgate) pretty much the first winter. Then it got the oil undercoating, and now it stays parked for the winter.
Absolutely correct about the salt. Spent 5 years at a Ford dealer on the Cape, where you’re basically a stone’s throw from the beach. The amount of undercarriage rust on 2 or 3 year old vehicles as apposed to working off Cape was incredible.
Rust, yes we are familiar opponents they dont salt snow here ice melt liquid then grit, rust happens quite well in high humidity and coastal salt air, some inland areas are volcanic so sulphur reigns supreme, I worked at a geothermal power station repairing what that stuff does to metal, hell it eats fibreglass too,
My daily drive is French and no you probably havent seen one but its nice and galvanized art the factory, I swapped the towbar over from my previous C5 and had to run a tap thru the captive nuts inside the rear rails to vget the zinc out and the bolts in, but I also have a Hillman estate and the metal mites have had a go at it, got em in a stunned state for now so all good, it might outlast the new engine I just installed, new brakes are going in now, new engine forced that.
I really should write my fleet up and post it you wont see another like it, the cars them selves arent common, though a friend and I swapped Hillman estates one day and drove eacjothers cars.
What a dick move not to have a connector for the wires – was it Volvo that had a flat connector on the chassis make contact with the harness on the tailgate? In any case if I were you I would actually wire in a block and leave the wires in this tailgate be. In case you ever need to do this job again that way you’re set without needing all that extra effort.
Loved the post!
I share your sentiments about how BMW chose to make this. And I’ve thought about doing just what you suggest. The complication is that I’d still have to figure out where each wire coming out of the tailgate goes in terms of mating to whatever is on the body side. This is not a straight-forward process as there are actually quite a few wiring changes so far as wire color/codes during the production year, even though yes I do have all of the schematics. Matching up my late 2008 chassis wires with the 2007 wires coming out of the tailgate will require a lot of patience…probably just as much as pulling wires out of the old tailgate. FWIW, I have had tailgate wires repaired by the dealer under warranty…and when I later went back into the loom to fix them again (because they keep breaking), I discovered that the dealer in some cases spliced together wires of two different colors/codes! It’s all a big mess and is surprisingly random and chaotic contrary to what one would expect on one of these Bavarian-built machines.
Volvo had block connectors on the 3 or 4 wires (that always break) that feed from the body to the tailgate. The tricky area there is the ridiculous ground wire soldered into the hinge mechanism. If you don’t maintain that ground, neither the rear window defroster or rear wiper motor will work.
Knowing the complexity of modern Gernam cars, I’m almost surprised the tailgate didn’t come with an embedded chip requiring the car’s entire electrical system be reprogrammed to avoid recognizing the tailgate as a foreign body (part) and thus a threat to the body’s integrity, and therefore bricking the entire car!
Oh, wait, that’s only come in on for 2024 model year? Phew!
(Hope I haven’t given them an idea…..)
That wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe it came in 2009, which is why my tailgate only works for 2004 – 2008 😉
A couple of things. One, I am glad we moved from Maryland to California in 1966. Otherwise I may not still have my first car or any of the other cars. Two, I see you have or had a Cooper Mini. I no longer like the Mini after yesterday morning on the Bay Bridge.
A Mini stalled in the early morning hours heading eastbound just before Treasure Island in the far right lane. No shoulders on the Bay Bride. In seconds the driver and rear seat passenger were dead and the front passenger dies on reaching the hospital. Rear ended by a Toyota Tacoma doing freeway speed whatever that means since the posted limit is 50 mph. The Tacoma’s bumper was right behind the driver’s seat after taking out the back half. Scary in that today’s trucks have bumpers much higher than many cars and especially small ones like the Mini.
Ugh, that sounds like a horrible accident. A new MINI is not that small, but nothing stopped is going to stand up to getting rear-ended into by a Tacoma at over 50mph. The size disparity there was a tragedy waiting to happen.
It’s highly unlikely the bumper height made much if any difference with that speed differential. Then again while there may be laws mandating bumper heights on new vehicles sold by a manufacturer, there are zero (or at least zero enforcement thereof) as regards what an owner does in terms of replacing the factory item or raising the suspension of a vehicle that then completely negates whatever rules were in place initially. The Tacoma in this incident did appear to be a stock mid to late 2000’s 4×4 version while the Mini appeared to be from the mid-2000s.
I saw the pictures of that incident and it’s not clear to me how the people in front perished, or at least it wasn’t obviously due to crushing etc, indicating that the result may have been the same in most vehicles. The driver’s front door opened normally (was wide open at the scene, then was normally closed as it was being loaded on the towtruck) and was not deformed at all, and the front seats did not appear to be pushed forward. The rear pretty much became the crumple zone though.
A good reason to be aware of what is behind you as you travel in traffic, I know I do switch lanes at times depending what is behind and which vehicle I’m driving, especially in snowy or otherwise inclement conditions..
Living in southern Ontario I am very used to rust, but my experience with newer cars has been a big improvement from cars from the 80s and earlier. I have never seen brining done her, but lots of salt is used. I now live in a small town and they use less salt than they do in Toronto. Sometimes if it is very cold they just spread some sand.
I have a 2012 Fiat 500 and although the tailgate has not yet rusted, I have had to repair the wires running to it twice. It is not a problem I have had with any other tailgates.
I recently discovered that the town of Goderich, which is about an hour drive south of us has the world’s largest underground salt mine. It is owned by a company from Kansas, so it might be exporting to the USA. It might be the source of some of this rust inducing salt.
Mike, you raise a good point about spreading sand.
There’s probably another article to be written about the history of how/why highway departments nearly everywhere (at least in the US) have shifted to working to melt all of the snow and ice off of roads and not just plowing and providing traction (sand) on certain roads.
This is probably something that Jason Shafer could answer as he seems involved professionally in the process.
Plain sand would actually do quite a good job in my smallish town on most of the roads aside from the more heavily traveled state highways (that cut through town). The same could be said of most of the roads in most of the nearby towns. I’d think that sand would cost less and be more environmentally friendly. Nevertheless, over the past decade, I’ve seen the amount of sand used – even that mixed into the salt that is spread – decrease to nearly zero.
I believe that temperature is a significant factor. Below -18C/0F salt is ineffective, causing colder areas to use sand. A paved road with a good layer of dry sand is surprisingly slippery. One result is that you need to sweep all the streets in the spring. When our winters were consistently cold, by the end of winter our street would have a layer of ice/snow that was an inch or 2 thick. In the spring when it started to melt and break up, it would be a rough ride for a couple of days.
Good points again. This causes me to remember that we used to have a street sweeper machine that made annual visits to my road and all town roads in the spring. I haven’t seen that machine in use for some years now…coinciding with the town’s switch over to all salt.
I got rear ended in my 07 Audi wagon, and went and got a junkyard bumper cover and hatch. It was then that I found the same thing, the wires are all run from deep in the car, across the hatch hinges, and into their terminations in the hatch, no connector. A very frustrating thing. Not only that, but removing the 4 bolts that hold it on involves dropping the headliner and removing a good bit of trim. So despite having bought the junkyard hatch (which didn’t match color anyway), I decided to repair my original one. Paint on the bumper in particular doesn’t match 100% in all light conditions or angles, but overall good enough
Good job Matt!
I wonder why Audi also decided to do that. It just makes no sense to me not to have a separable connector for wires leading into the tailgate. On the Volvo, you also have to pull down some of the headliner…but that’s a lot easier with the stretched plastic fabric on that older car than it would be the one piece plastic sheet that we find for modern headliners.
Nice VW van! I hope you don’t drive that much in the winter.
Thanks! Seeing how the wiring seems to be across multiple manufacturers, I would guess there is some benefit during initial assembly doing it like this vs the repairability benefit of doing a connector.
The bus does not get driven in the winter, it helps that the heat is pretty much non functional. It’s a big, drafty, ice box
I happen to have a spare hatch (in the correct color) for our ’05 Jaguar X-Type Estate and its wiring is all connected via a a series of connectors about a foot in from the opening under the headliner. Same era of vehicle as those of yours.
If we end up using/replacing it it’ll for sure make the job a lot easier but I suppose a connector does add another potential failure point as well as manufacturing cost, but down the road it’s far better for this kind of scenario as there is a fair amount of wiring what with the separate glass and gate openings, electric buttons for both, upper brake light, etc.
Clearly the way it SHOULD be done. (Jaguar putting proper connectors on the harness and a fellow wagon owner stocking up on replacement hatches)
And here it is repaired/repainted
I’m guessing you had a quick glimpse inside the plastic panel-thing of the tailgate in NC, so it thus could potentially be said you went a hell of a long way to open a door. (“Yes, yes, I’m coming!”)
I could not rustle up any interest in any car not new if I had to live in climates that mean roads do this to cars. In this dry country (albeit in a part with a mild-to-cool climate), that BM would have literally no rust damage whatsoever. It’s hard to explain how weirdly other-worldly it looks to see a very familiar 16 y.o. car with 100 y.o.-looking rust damage underneath. It’s as if the Beemer was released there 80 years ago!
Magnesium chloride is warfare. The stuff is quite hygroscopic, so while it sits on your car it keeps absorbing moisture, making things worse. Sodium chloride is much less hygroscopic; it’s not perfect, but from what I’ve seen it is not nearly as vicious.
Also vicious is how BMW wired your car. Although they aren’t alone. Long ago my father-in-law had an ’86 Crown Vic two door. It was originally from Chicago and it had rust on the driver’s door. I found a spotless door at a salvage yard in Kansas City and bought it. However, the wiring for the power windows, speakers, and such was exactly as you describe on your BMW. Father-in-law had a heck of a time getting it all wired up.
The pulled pork you show looks amazing. I agree with you about barbecue being our national food. The practice may be more common that I realize, but I’ve seen places take that meat, put it on a bun, put the slaw on top, and have a wonderful sandwich. Plus vinegar based slaw is the way to go.
I admire your efforts to keep that aging BMW on the road, and looking good whilst it is there. Staying ahead of rust in our climates is not for the fainthearted!
You are a better man than I am – or maybe you just have a better car. After an early effort to stave off visible rust on my Honda Fit (a white car, which makes matters worse) it has finally gotten the better of me and I have resigned myself to the car’s now-status as a daily beater. In addition to both rear wheel lip spots, it is working its way through the underside of the left rear door. But for the first time in my life, I no longer care. It is actually kind of liberating.
Hummmmm. Your actual experience is making me wonder if I could be wrong about where the Fit will start rusting. Maybe it won’t be the tailgate. I should be seeing it next month…I’ll have to let you know 🙂
Rear wheel opening where it meets the rear bumper . . .
. . . and the inside of the bottom of the left rear door.
I guess I can’t complain, with the car nearing the end of winter no. 18.
Having been through the ringer with BMWs myself, not much of a fan anymore, but as a native Baltimorean (Baltimoron?) I love the Calvert/Crab sticker on the bumper!
Living in Central NY, rust is omnipresent on any vehicle used year round after a very short time. The only answer is a sacrificial winter beater, and with a full frame vehicle rust can get pretty bad before the final sacrifice is made.
Thank you! I like to think of it as a Calvert sticker too, as Calvert County along the Patuxent River is one of my favorite places in Maryland.
Funny…that sticker is getting a bit faded; and so on my trip back from NC on this written-about trip (October, 2023) I stopped at all of the I95 rest areas between Baltimore and Chesapeake House looking for a new one in the gift shops. No luck. I’ll have to get one from Amazon I guess.
Here in Southeastern Ontario they plaster the roads with salt. Even after less than 2-3 cms of snow.
I’ve never had rust this bad, on any of my cars. A habit I learned from my dad, was to wash my cars weekly in winter. Particularly during the snowiest and wettest months of December and March. Especially, focusing on the underbody. Typically, using a self-serving wash wand, where fresh water is only used. It’s been insurance against severe rust for decades. Still get rust, but it is very manageable. My dad had no trouble having his ’78 Aspen wagon get to 1991, with its body mostly intact.