Featured Website: RealOEM.com

For the second in the Featured Website series of posts, I've picked a real heavy hitter, RealOEM.com.

If you haven't heard of RealOEM, you in for a treat. As an owner of a BMW group product, this has to occupy your number one slot in your browser's favourites tab. It is the most useful resource for BMWs by a long shot, I can only dream of a site like it for my Audi S5.

RealOEM describes itself as a site that "...can be used to look up BMW part numbers and approximate part prices."

After clicking here to enter, you're greeted with a few options on how you'd like to search.

You can use the last 7 digits of your VIN, a specific part number or all parts associated with your model from a specific build date.

For no other reason than I'm too lazy to remember my VIN, I tend to use the latter option, which is what I've used in the example below.

Once you've picked your model, you're greeted with a bunch of subcategories.

Clicking on any of them will bring up all the schematics associated with that subcategory. Below, I've chosen the turbo charger, a page I became very familiar with after needing to replace my turbo's...

Along with a labelled schematic, you get a table of parts, with added information such as; part number, fitted quantity, rough indication of cost in $ and if applicable, when the parts were in service. If you click on the numbers on the schematic, it highlights the row in the table that corresponds, in the screen grab above I've selected part 1, which turns the table row red.

Most of my time on RealOEM has been looking for the parts and part numbers relating to a certain fix I was carrying out at the time, such as when I replaced the valve cover gasket, but I also used it to find optional extras that I didn't have, i.e. features I could retrofit, the perfect example of this is when I fitted the cup holders to my E46 330d.

The icing on the cake for RealOEM is that some parts have a photo too, which is incredibly useful in helping to confirm you're ordering the correct part and identifying the part in the depths of your engine bay.

I've (unfortunately) spent hours on RealOEM over the years, but it could have been a whole lot more time researching if it didn't exist and for that I'm very grateful.

Let me know in the comments below if RealOEM has ever saved your bacon, are there any other websites you think can top it?

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