M42 running on steam power?

[E36-italia]

Hey all,

winter is in full swing...sort of... we had 2 weeks of quite a bit of fog in the evenings and when driving home from work I noticed a huge amount of white smoke coming out the back of my car, and the people behind me saw it too!
sometimes it looks if it runs on steam!

When it is cold and humid outside my engine smokes quite a bit when the engine is cold also... when I drive for about 1km @ 3000rpm it stops smoking, then standing still for the traffic lights the smoke comes back.

Does that mean that the cat is about to fail into pieces? (or already is) or is there something more wrong?
it has 227K km, uses ~250cc of oil every 3000km ...drinking a bit of coolant, but that goes up onto the windows (fogging up my windows) but not into the engine, oils stays oily.
And when parking my car into my garage box...I don't smell coolant, just a very poisoning/bad exhaust gas smell

Is it something to worry about?:confused:

[jakeb]

smoking oil yes....
just light white/gray steam and then it goes away once it is warmed then it is fine.  Just condensation in the exhuast system or something like that

[DesktopDave]

Condensation from the exhaust is normal in cold weather; burning petrol makes a lot of water.  When have you replaced your O2/lambda sensor?  A failed sensor or a bad temp sender might cause troubles like you're having.  If you have a bit of time, go get an exhaust gas analysis.  Should be cheap and the mechanic can tell you if you have coolant, water, unburned petrol, oil, etc. in the exhaust gases.

I'm not sure you have a catalyzed car either, early e36 models in EU may have had several configurations.  Double-check to be sure.

[E36-italia]

brought the car with no history, and it had a dealer name below the number plates, rang them but they never had it in service...

In the time I have it, the O2 sensor hasn't been replaced... i'll give it a exhaust gas test soon..