Welcome to the BMW O2-series Buyers Guide
Picture by way of 02 Club Deutscheland courtesy of BMW AG
Introduction
The goal of this website is to build an online guide to the purchase (or sale) of BMW O2-series cars.
The 4-cylinder, 2-door sedans BMW built from 1966 until 1977 continue to garner a "cult-like" enthusiasm. The enthusiastic owners of these cars continue to rave about their little sport sedans. For the purposes of this website, we will refer to these cars as the O2-series (Oh-two series).
The BMW O2-series of cars are small, inexpensive, attractive, and fun to drive sedans. Although there is a very tall cabin area (a lot of glass area), the proper 3-box dimensions still seem to be sporty. As a result, the BMW O2-series were the first cars to be considered "sport sedans."
The O2-series was a practical, if compact, four-seater and less expensive than any Mercedes offered at the time. The 2002 was not particularly fast, but it was durable and enticed the owner into driving it "spiritedly." As a result of being driven hard, many O2-series cars can be tired, abused, and neglected.
However, the enthusiasts continue to consider the O2-series one of the best BMWs ever built and that means a lot of people are restoring their cars. In fact, you can still find fanatically maintained examples, but buying one of these will be extremely difficult -- the owners of these cars won't sell!
A comprehensive, dynamic buyer's guide does not exist on the web for the BMW 02-series. You have to go to a number of different websites to gather buying information, read 2-5 books, and then decide what is useful to you. We want to help narrow down the information and provide some guideline for the intelligent, practical purchase of these cars.
Nothing is more annoying in any of the BMW 02-series discussion forum websites then a new person - or "newbie" - asking for generic advice regarding the purchase of an O2-series BMW (see the links for popular website references). Therefore, we created this O2-series Buyers Guide as a central location for everyone's "expert" advice.
I have been assembling information and documentation related to the purchase of BMW 2002s for over 15 years. I have been stating to my friends in the BMW 2002 community that I would release this information for a number of years. Therefore, the goal of this project is to finally release a BMW 2002 Buyer's Guide to the Internet for everyone to use.
Buying an "O2-series" BMW can be one of the most enjoyable car buying and ownership experiences you will ever encounter. However, this is not something you should do alone.
With the help of a lot of people, we continue to accumulate and revise this buyers guide to help you in your quest for the right O2-series for you.
The best way to go look at an O2-series is:
- Become knowledgeable about these cars. Associate with people that know what they are doing, read as much as you can, and go look at as many cars as you can before making a decision which one you want to buy.
- Then, take the car to a knowledgeable, willing and interested mechanic. See the section about selecting a mechanic.
In this buyers guide, we will try to focus primarily on just US Models, but we will insert non-US information as necessary. We tried to stay away from creating a Frequently Asked Questions document. The goal of this document is to give you some guidelines on what to look for when purchasing a BMW 1600/2002 and we will try to stay focused on this endeavor.
Lastly, we did not want to create an authenticity guide. Where it is important, we point out things to look for to confirm originality. But, the factory did some unusual things, so not all of our guidelines are rules. They are merely areas to look at and ask intelligent questions to confirm originality.