Shifting into reverse with a new 120i

[feo]

I just got myself a new 120i manual. Any BMW owners, how much resistance should there be when shifting into reverse?

 

[4cer]

from my experience with Bm's quite a bit you have to push it quite hard.

 

[4cer]

i.e my mom struggles in the 320i

 

[Pitbull]

All rear wheel drive cars take a little more force to get the car in reverse than any other gear. Think it's because of the possition of the gearbox.

I might be wrong

 

[fxit_man]

from my experience with Bm's quite a bit you have to push it quite hard.

yup BMW's have been like that for ages

 

[HapticSimian]

All rear wheel drive cars take a little more force to get the car in reverse than any other gear. Think it's because of the possition of the gearbox.

I might be wrong

You are. It has little to nothing to do with the position of the gearbox - this isn't the same on all RWD cars after all. The 'problem' with BMWs is the mechanism they chose to guard against people shifting into reverse by mistake... Opels often have a ring under the knob (man, that sounds wrong) that you pull up in order to engage reverse. VWs & Audis require that you push down on the gear lever as you push towards reverse. BMWs just require a lot more sideways force towards reverse gear, i.e. you need to push much harder to the left to get beyond the resistance on the 1st-2nd gear plane.

As for how much is normal... my mom snapped the gear lever clean off on her old E30 320i in the driveway one morning. It was cold; the rubber gear knob was old and brittle; she was mad at someone, probably me.

I've always wondered why BMW don't just convert to a better setup - I can quite easily picture some dainty young thing with too much money who sells her M3 because she can't get it into reverse.

 

[Gnome]

I like the Opel one the most and I'm not saying that just because I drive an Opel, it works well, you lift up the nob thingy on the gear lever to go into reverse (hard to explain but doesn't take much force or effort). And it's next to 1st. I hate driving in a Toyota and Nissan with the reverse at the end!

/Rant

That said reverse doesn't usually have a synchro, gearboxes use the synchro rings to synchronize the wheel and engine speeds so the gears can engage. Reverse on most gearboxes however don't have one, it's easy to test if you have synchro on reverse, if you can shift into reverse as the car moves (backward/forward motion doesn't matter, either one) then it has a synchro, otherwise you need to stand perfectly still with the car at idle. The further the engine is from idle or the more motion on the road wheels, the more resistance (or it might just refuse to go in with that horrible gear scratching sound). Naturally if the car is moving and you rev to the right RPM you can also engage (IE. you manually synchronised the gears).

So long as it doesn't scratch it's normal for reverse to be difficult

 

[Dolby]

my mom snapped the gear lever clean off on her old E30 320i in the driveway one morning. It was cold; the rubber gear knob was old and brittle; she was mad at someone, probably me.

Now that you remind me with this story, my dad did the same on his E30 BMW