Some of you may remember the story; it wasn’t that long ago, Presidents Day Weekend 2016. I was still daily-driving my Suburban with the resurrected brake lines. The ’Burb was only still running because it had borrowed a volume of sheer will from my soul.

It was bitter cold, single digits in the Boston area. I had little to do over the weekend but pound on Craigslist. I began playing a little game: What BMW could I find, within 50 miles of my home, for two grand or less, that I might consider using as a daily driver? It had to be a real car, not a project or a basket case. It was a fun game. It gave me hope. It kept me warm and out of trouble.

Until I actually found something.

It’s not that I’d never buy an automatic. Among the things I troll for are cheap twelve-cylinder 850is and E38s, but buying one and daily-driving it would be highly unlikely and would break with 35 years of precedent (62 BMWs and only one automatic, an E12 530i flipper back in the day). So I searched on Craigslist, as I so often do, for BMWs with standard transmissions, sorted by price.

A saw a plethora of E39 540i V8 six-speeds for very short money in need of timing-chain-guide work. Nope, no projects or basket cases, move along, nothing here to see.

Then, a few screens in, I saw it: A 2003 E39 530i, five-speed, sport package (often mistakenly called the M Sport package because of the M-logo steering wheel and shift knob), 175,000 miles, been off the road two years, reportedly wouldn’t start, asking price two grand.

Hmm.

I called the seller, and he reported that when jumped, the car wouldn’t start, that it just made “that clicking sound.” “I think it needs a starter motor,” the seller said. I explained how, particularly in very cold weather, a car with a dead battery won’t take a jump-start due to high resistance in jumper cables and a bad “bite” on the battery terminals, and how you therefore often you need to pull the old battery out, drop in a fully-charged battery, and clean the terminals and posts in order to get the engine to crank and the car to start. He said that he was an electrician and understood all about high resistance in jumper cables.

It was one of the times when I’ve had to bite my tongue and not say, “Well, I wrote a book about electrical systems in European cars.” Hell, maybe he was right; maybe it did need a starter. But I thought that driving out there, dropping a battery in, and seeing which one of us was right would make a good little Roundel Online article.

So I drove out to Bellingham, Massachusetts, in biting cold. And when I saw the car, I was quite surprised: It was beautiful—silver with a black sport interior, and barely a scratch on it, at least not on the side that wasn’t embedded in a snowbank.

I dropped in the battery, and to the seller’s astonishment, the car fired up as if it had been running the day before. The seller and I dug it out of the snowbank, he dragged over a compressor and inflated the tires, I drove it, and other than the tires being flat-spotted and the Check Engine light glowing, there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with it.

What’s more, I really liked it almost instantly. I don’t really think of myself as an E39 guy, as in general I prefer smaller, lighter, snappier, simpler, cars. But I liked this E39. So I bought it for $1,500. And I’ve been daily-driving it ever since.

The cause of the Check Engine light turned out to be a dry-rotted vacuum line feeding the secondary air pump. I needed to replace the final-stage unit (the blower fan resistor), as it failed and began draining the battery. And, as you may recall, I went through a truly ridiculous wheel-refinishing exercise on an inexpensive but badly corroded set of Style 42s.

But that’s been pretty much it. Unlike the 1999 528iT sport wagon which had me on the Repair-Of-The-Week plan most of the time I owned it, the 530i has been—dare I say it?—reliable.

When I bought the 530i, I was still working at Bentley Publishers. I had a 7.5-mile commute on local roads from Newton into Cambridge. On every post-E30 BMW I’ve ever bought and relied on as a daily driver, I’ve dutifully followed Mike Miller’s recommendation and done the full-on “plastic kit,” replacing the radiator, expansion tank, thermostat, water pump, and hoses unless there are receipts showing when they’ve been done.

In theory, you can look at the date stamps of the components to see how old they are, and decide whether you should prophylactically replace them, but in practice, the date stamps are often difficult to see until the part has been exposed, in which case you might as well just replace it. Instead, I made a strategically lazy decision not to replace what wasn’t broken, rationalizing that, with the short commute, if the E39 began running hot, I’d just pull over, call AAA, and get it towed back to my house.

Then, this past October, my sojourn at Bentley ended, and I began working from home, meaning that I had no commute. My strategy appeared to be paying off brilliantly.

Still, though, obviously there are times I need to drive the car farther than just around town. A few weeks ago I needed to get up to Burlington, Vermont, to have a look at a couple of interesting cars; it’s about a 3.5-hour drive each way. While I could’ve used this as an opportunity to drive one of the vintage cars, I actually relished the idea of taking the E39, as it’s fast, comfortable, smooth, quiet, and has cruise control and a great sound system. Whenever I venture outside the radius of inexpensive AAA towing, I am keenly aware of the fact that I’m driving a modern BMW with an unsorted cooling system—but north I went.

And it was glorious. Other than making me keenly aware that I clearly need to take all nine of the Style 42 wheels I wound up with, spin them, select the straightest four, buy a new set of tires, and get them mounted and balanced, nothing went wrong, and the drive up and back was an absolute delight. Eighteen months into ownership, I really like this E39. (Note that in the language of my people, this is called “giving it a kenahora,” meaning that now that I’ve said this, the next time out, the E39’s expansion tank will explode and the car will drop all of its coolant in the least convenient place imaginable.)

Perhaps, during the dog days of August, when it’s 95ºF and 90% humidity outside, and I want to sit in the air-conditioned comfort of my house and pound on Craigslist for something epically stupid, I’ll locate some hobbled twelve-cylinder BMW at a price point so dirt-cheap that I’ll feel that it’s an act of culpable negligence against my readers not to pull the trigger on it. But until then, if you see a guy who looks like a thin Jerry Garcia blow by you at 80 mph in a silver E39 530i, and he looks very relaxed, don’t ask him if he’s changed his water pump yet. You’ll disturb his sense of repose.—Rob Siegel

Rob’s new book, Ran When Parked: How I Resurrected a Decade-Dead 1972 BMW 2002tii and Road-Tripped it a Thousand Miles Back Home, and How You Can, Too, is now available on Amazon. Or you can order personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.