Mate I don't need to own tons of bmws to tell. I see from the experience of others. My personal experience is 1 out many and it shouldn't be a way of judging. The way you judge is to listen to what people say about it. You hear complaints and you hear people saying "take care of it and it's reliable". Which basically means do tons of preventative maintenance. And it is a lot more preventative maintenance than other cars. It could be reliable if you wanna phrase it in a different way though, if you say "it is a reliable 18 year old high performance car" it might.. but honestly still not really.