Some car parts we expect to be expensive. Catalytic converters, obscure sensors, and infotainment systems can all cost a hefty sum to replace. When it comes to a small plastic flap, though, you might expect to score a replacement cheap. As one BMW owner found out, though, this one part actually sells for a much heftier price.
The video below comes to us from menace_of_winnipeg on Instagram. It shows them holding a broken piece of plastic next to their convertible BMW. “You take your car to BMW thinking this little piece of plastic will be $50 max,” they muse in the video – only to then show a quote from Birchwood BMW for $889.
The piece in question looks like little more than a random piece of trim. The video shows us that it covers up a small area on the rear quarter. I figured surely this was an outlier, that this part could surely be had for much less than $889 US dollars. It turns out I was quite wrong.
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If we freeze-frame the video, we can read the part number from the quote: 54-37-5-A19-AB1. Most parts sites list this simply as “BMW Flap.” More specifically, it’s a flap that covers part of the convertible top mechanism on the F33 series BMW models. If you’re unfamiliar with your BMW codes, that’s basically the 4 Series convertibles built from 2013 to 2020.
Now, the part that menace_of_winnipeg is replacing is actually a small piece of the larger flap assembly designated by the part number above. However, that tiny little part isn’t available on its own. BMW only sells the linkage flap as a whole, and it’s expensive wherever you look.
I started my search at third-party parts houses. ECS Tuning and Turner Motorsport both had genuine versions of the part. Each site charged $877.99, discounted compared to a reported MSRP of $903.99. BMW of South Atlanta has it for $821.85, which is a little better. The best price I could find was OEM Parts Online, currently selling it for $725.75—a lot cheaper, but still a brutal ask for a simple bit of plastic.
Looking at photos, it’s not a particularly complicated component. It looks to be made of two or three pieces of injection-molded plastic, with a shaft, spring, and flat metal bar attached. On a commodity car like a Toyota, you’d expect a trim piece like this to be maybe $50; certainly less than $200. None of the components are expensive to make or have particularly high tolerances, nor is it some complicated assembly that takes a lot of fine work to put together. In any case, BMW has set the sticker price at $903.99, and you have to shop around to get it cheaper anywhere else.
So why is it so expensive? We can only speculate. It could be due to rarity. During the run of the F32-generation 4 Series, BMW was selling anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 units a year. However, only a small proportion of those were convertible models wearing the F33 designation. Thus, this is a part that only applies to a very limited proportion of cars, and BMW may not have made a lot of spares. This can drive prices up significantly. For example, in Australia, there aren’t that many original MX-5s left on the road. Cam angle sensors fail with age, but Mazda decided long ago it would stop replenishing its stocks of spare parts. With precious few available, prices skyrocketed, with dealers often charging over $1,000 for a part you’d normally expect to score for less than $250.
That’s ultimately just a theory—BMW may have its own reasons for charging such a high price for a simple plastic flap. Ultimately, this should spur owners to seek alternative solutions. 3D printing may be a viable route forward, or simply scoring the necessary parts from a pull-a-part wrecker. The latter route, of course, presumes you can find a 4 Series convertible in such a yard. If you could, though, it’s hard to imagine them charging you more than a few bucks for what looks like an innocuous piece of interior trim.
In any case, put it down to the good ol’ Euro tax. Sometimes, if you wanna own a BMW, you gotta pay the toll.
Images: menace_of_winnipeg via Instagram screenshot, BMW, ECS Tuning
Because OEM car part pricing is completely arbitrary. There are parts that seem quite cheap for what they are and vice versa.
I try to purchase OEM Ford parts as much as I can for my car and it’s just insane sometimes. And by insane I don’t just mean expensive. I mean there is no rhyme or reason. I was looking at two identical pieces of small trim. One was driver and the other pass side, but otherwise a complete mirror image. The driver side was almost 2x as expensive as the pass side and we’re not talking few bucks. A leather-wrapped shifter knob? $68. A 20-wire connector pigtail: $110.
It’s all completely stupid. It’s not just BMW.
Someone in a Toyota group I belong to posted a screenshot of the new 14″ screen on the TNGA vehicles. $14,000 list price from Toyota.
Someone commented that if you were to build the truck by ordering each piece form Toyota, it’d probably cost a few million dollars, haha.
True story- I lost the little roundel in the middle of the BMW wheel. Went to the dealer for a replacement ready to take one on the chin… and it was $3. *shrug*
Ford supposedly prices parts by the number they have.
Unrelated to supply elsewhere.
It is weird though.
3D printing FTW!
I can’t understand why everyone is moaning about the cost.
Being BMW parts, these flapdoodles are obviously hand-carved by, and polished on the sweet thighs of, luscious Bavarian maidens.
They don’t work cheap, you know.
the freaking front license plate delete trim for my E38 is a gazillion too. Welcome to my world bitches
I remember being at the show and saw the Mustang Convertibles there, i think it was the first year they came up with redesigned model. what made me remember is at that exact spot where the BMW has a flap Mustangs had a big void, nothing, no flap, just a hole and you can peek inside. wonder if they covered it by now
There’s a part that you install and remove by hand. (Or leave them in the trunk/garage forever.)
thanks. for the show purposes it makes sense to remove them as they would be stolen
you should be glad it does not come with “flap on-demand” subscription plan
when you buy a new BMW thinking that anything other than your monthly subscription will be at or about $50 is childish.
Ah yes the joys of luxury German car ownership…
The front plate bracket for my 2013 Audi TT RS had an official price of $560.
Found it half price from a Latvian eBay joint, with delivery it still ended up over $300.
I wonder if it was the same seller that I bought parts for my Mk7.5 Sportwagen for. They sold the auxillary jack point kit that was used on the A4 and TT on the MQB platform, about 1/4 the dealer price in the US for the kit, and half of ECS.
Of course the official sticker price is the sucker’s price, any minimally stocked operation is going to get big discounts on those numbers.
I don’t know, $900 buys me a whole lot of duct tape…
I wonder if it’d be legal for companies to laser scan all these parts and then sell the files online, for people to print these non-structural parts themselves.
Legal or not, they are available.
I think laser scanning would get you into some I.P. rights battles that probably aren’t worth fighting from the consumer side
But under right-to-repair laws, where they exist, you could almost certainly blank-slate design a functional replacement and be in the clear. Aftermarket parts already fill a wide gulf of categories that are OEM equivalent, just not OEM exact. Effectively stealing BMW’s I.P. would be riskier
If you look at engineering methods used for ‘expedient, homemade, improvised firearms’, there are many approaches that don’t require a printer when you bypass mass production methods.
Making one or ten of something instead of a warehouse full requires different approaches.
Unrelated to BMW, I recently researched Henkel for plastic repair adhesives.
They recommended a 2 part, but I used a single part adhesive of theirs on a different generally unrepairable plastic widget.
It never came loose, for what that’s worth.
Can’t review the 2 part epoxy yet.
I think you’d only be looking at trouble if you try to sell them.
It’s probably not something they can copyright. Their own drawings, yes; the parts, probably not.
It’s not trademarked (though you couldn’t reproduce the roundel, or other actual trademarks).
It’s probably not patented in the USA, though there is some risk there.
There may be trade secrets, but it’s BMW’s job to keep their own secrets; physical reverse engineering isn’t illegal.
It’s probably legal.
Plastic. Welder.
After reading the Sebring convertible article, and now this, I’m convinced I’ll never own a complicated drop-top.
So, what you’re saying is there is a market to be had, in designing and figuring out how to 3D print these random plastic components, and sell them for half of what the dealers charge?
I see 4 molds, I think, required there. Let’s just use 3. Each die will cost around $10k. So, $30k just to make the mold. Each mold is good for probably 50-100k parts. So, maybe you need two for each. So, let’s put it at $60k for just the dies.
Each time it’s setup, it’s another $5k. And, they probably squirt maybe 10k each setup. So, 10 setups? Add another $50k, now we are at $110k just to make all of the parts for these 3 pieces. Cost per part out of the mold, maybe $2 each. So, add in another $200k. $310k. The rest of the parts are easily $5 per assembly. $500k. Labor to assembly, $10 per. So, $1million.
Add that up, that’s almost $2million for every part made. So, we are talking about $20 per assembly, cost.
Now, do you BMW multiplier, and we are easily at $900 per part.
Did I math that correctly????
Hmm, BMW math is not exactly what most buyers are into.
Also,
looking at the flipped-over detail pic, I think I’m seeing a second metal shaft set into the left margin in the photo. One more part, either assembled, or placed as an insert in the mold (it looks more like assembled).there’s some kind of clip that reaches over to grab that one. Possible additional part.The flat spring is overmolded, so there’s at least one additional inspection added to its part price, and an additional mold if it’s not one Parsko has accounted for alreadyThere’s an adhesive rubber or felt pad on the underside of one flap, between it and the flat spring. Additional part, additional labor, additional inspectionSo those two flaps are both moving parts. Significant engineering time, and on this model we are amortizing engineering into a relatively small number of units.I’m not saying it makes this
partassembly is worth 900$, but again, this is way far from a 50$ piece of plastic.Exactly. Without volume, this stuff costs.
And if people think that’s silly, they ought to see what a wing mirror mold costs.
Like the ones made by the custom car industry every day?
Less than you’d think.
That depends on the job of the mold. For very low volume where hand finishing is fine, sure.
Think something like a mainstream, high-volume luxury manufacturer. They need to produce hundreds of thousands of a part per year. At a very high quality. That needs an absolute minimum of finishing afterwards.
Apparently they’ve gotten cheaper, but they’re still around the $50K range, and years ago they were closer to $100,000.
Maybe for mass production.
How about engineering to make ten or twenty?
Do they need to be identical to OEM past critical points?
Where labor is cheap enough, most shapes can be made with three simple tools
I suspect the volumes are lower, and the costs correspondingly higher. As service parts, of course, the volume is still far lower.
I suspect service parts, in this (most?) cases, are just left over production parts put on a shelf. When this is done, due to costs to keep them warm and dry, warrants octupling the cost.
I like how youtube face in the thumbnail has evolved into using emojis doing youtube face.
BMW: “Because fuck you, that’s why”
Bring
Mama’s
Wallet
But in Austrian, please.
There is zero profit to be made selling cheap parts unless you sell huge quantities of them. Most automakers, especially “premium” brands like BMW, give zero Fs about owners of their products once they are out of warranty and have no reason to keep making replacement parts. If there isn’t a big enough demand for a third party to make them, you’re out of luck entirely.
More and more cars will become expensive paperweights as small but necessary parts stop being available. The only people who will complain are the people who don’t buy new cars, and they are invisible to car makers.
I’ve read about Cadillac XLRs being totalled out by insurance companies because the (ridiculously computerized) tail lights were not attainable. I don’t know what brain trust at GM approved that design, but they were morons.
Can’t wait for the Slate to get to market.
I found out the hard way with my fiances Tourx about stupid expensive plastic as one day I went into the garage and the front logo was missing. It either got hit by something while driving or stolen on Chicago. Ones for a non-acc car were like 50-80 bucks but since hers has ACC you need a special emblem since it goes right on front of the sensor and it cost like 350 bucks for a new one. Ridiculous and I really do not think there was anything inside them emblem itself to make ACC work as it still worked fine without it.
The plastic trim ring surrounding the headlight switch on my E39 is $300. Without it, the switch falls into the dashboard and you have to use needle nose pliers to turn the headlights on or off. Which is what I do every time I need headlights.
I know 3D printing advice is pretty rote nowadays but someone with an E39 on hand to take measurements with a basic level of CAD knowledge could genuinely knock out a replacement piece in 30 minutes of design and a few hours for the print itself. That’s about $2 worth of filament at worst
That’s actually my plan. I have a 3D printer and I found a really nice toggle switch with off-park-on settings, and a matching on/off toggle to make the fog light switch on the opposite side look the same.
Every time I sit down for an evening to learn enough FreeCAD to make it happen, I get frustrated and give up. And I can’t afford Fusion 360. Eventually I’ll get it done. Needle nose pliers for now.
I bought a 4WD pickup with a totally dissolved plastic dash.
Most parts are engineered to function.
Not slickly but everything works and all I care about is traction.
I can do a better job of it, but it remains Mad Max as long as it works.
Most people couldn’t identify the model from the interior now.
BMW = Break My Wallet
“That’ll be $947.50”
“Wait, why the extra 50 bucks?”
“Tax”
“Tacks?! I thought the plastic clips would hold it on!”
/originally a condom joke but BMW still involves pricks too
I’ve seen situations were there was a $30 or more difference in the price of serpentine belts that were only a half inch in length different from each other.
Lots of times it has to do with the size of the production run. Let’s say the supplier makes a run of a million of a certain plastic part, then has to stop the line and set it up to make a couple thousand of a completely different part. But you still have to run the line the same, just for fewer parts. The costs to do that are amortized over a smaller run.
I assure you BMW isn’t just hiking the price of this in order to make an extra $800 on it just because they think they can.
These influencers are getting so soft. Back in the 2010’s, this would have been “WOW I fixed my 4 series with duct tape!’ click bait
Or “I visited 12 Pull-a-part junkyards in a week to find ONE. OBSCURE. PART.”
No, these days it’s all like a subtle money flex. Including this one.
Or the fix with Ramen noodles. But in all honesty, this does present itself an an ideal DIY fix via YouTube videos on plastic repairs.
Seems like the time to engage someone with a 3D printer.
I imagine there is someone out there right now trying to do this.
How about that genuine BMW e65 high pressure fuel pump that costs $16,000 new?
Yikes!!!!