Frank DeSantis — European brand specialist

European brand specialist. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen. Writes under a pen name to protect current dealership employment.

Frank DeSantis writes about European vehicles for ProblemsByVin — mostly BMW, Mercedes, and Audi, with the occasional piece on Volkswagen, Porsche, or Volvo. He works in dealership service in the New York metro area and writes here under a pen name because the work he's publishing wouldn't go over well at his day job. The pen-name disclosure is in plain sight on the About page.

His specialty is the cars most American shops won't touch — high-end BMW, Mercedes, and Audi from the early 2000s onward. The BMW N20 and N26 four-cylinder turbos with their timing chain issues. The Mercedes M272 V6 and M273 V8 with the balance shaft and idler gear class action. The VW/Audi EA888 2.0T across all three generations. The BMW N54 and N55 inline-sixes that turn ten years old and still feel like they did new, until they don't.

The thing Frank tries to get across in his writing is that European cars aren't unreliable cars. They're cars with different ownership economics. The repair bills run higher, parts can be either cheap or absurd, and the depreciation curve is steep enough that a four-year-old BMW 5-Series costs less than a four-year-old Camry. Whether that math works out depends on which platform you buy, how it was maintained before you got it, and whether you found the right independent specialist before the warranty ran out. Those are the questions his pieces try to answer.

Frank is ASE-certified and holds BMW factory certification through his current employer. He has no financial relationship with any extended warranty company, parts retailer, or auto manufacturer outside his employer, and his editorial work for ProblemsByVin is independent of his day job.