I Have 2 Questions.
This is about my 1991 850i

1) How can I tell if my car has a chip or not? I have not had it long and don;t know anything about how the chips work. But...I was looking under the hood and noticed a smaller sized cylinder (about 2-3 inches in diameter) toward the front of the engine compartment on passenger side. It has a few wires coming out of it and a sticker on top the reads something like..." caution, this car is equipped with a performance enhancing computer...before performing an EPROM call Dinan at so and so number..." What is that?

and

2) Transmission issue. I got a tiny bit of info from a previous post, but need more detail and help. Here is whats happening. originally car would have a problm on the freeway. It would act like I took my foot off the gas and have no power. If I took my foot off the pedal for half a second and gave it gas...it would be fine.Few times of that and then display would read "trans-fail safe prog." But it would do it sort of often. I heard someone mention the new battery thing, so I bought two new ones and it seemd fine. Then it did it every once in a while. Then it started to shift kinda hard and have trouble especially from 1st to 2nd gear, going past redline before shifting(even if normal city driving.) Then if I drove it fast at all or hard, it would smoke like the brakes were on fire. But it was coming from the muffler/exhast pispes like a liquid burning, mainly at the joints. Someone suggests a transmission fluid leak. Whenever I put teanny fluid in it runs much better...for a day or two. What's going on? ...other than that, seems to be perfect.

One more thing. Maybe i think this just because it is mine...but what variations did they have to this car. I don't think it has anything special or out of the ordinary...but for some reason it looks cooler than most 8 series I have seen, and seems to be faster than it should. Here is the VIN # just in case someone want's to tell me something I don't know:
WBAEG2312MCB74108

Thank You,


Mat

it idle's very low. sometimes so low that it will turn off.

-Mat

1) The Dinan warning sticker is on the diagnostic port as a warning to the dealer not to flash the installed Dinan eproms back to stock during a service.
So it is or was chipped. The only way to tell for sure is to open the computers.

Item #2 is several parts.

IMMEDIATELY have the lines that run from the transmission to the cooler checked and tightened. If you have that much fluid loss they are probably about to pop off.

Once the leak is fixed you can see how it runs. There may be a Dinan transmission chip installed also.

The dying at idle could be any of several things. Do some research in the E31 archives at Roadfly.

The US '91 850 was pretty standardized--EDC (electronically controlled shocks) was one of the few options. The six peed was another.
The exterior changes were pretty limited but there were several Tuner shops that modified the spoilers on front and rear. Email me a couple of pictures if you would like.