Even the most mundane BMW repairs can be entertaining if Sreten Milisavljevic is the guy doing the job.
YouTube is a mixed bag for car enthusiasts. At the very top you have mostly insufferable influencers that use flashy thumbnails and titles to grab views, with content that’s often unoriginal and sometimes misleading. At the same time there are plenty of bright spots, like the tire-melting folks at Hoonigan, the white-board-filling genius of Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained, or our very own Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire. Somewhere along that spectrum sits a relatively new channel called M539 Restorations.
Created and managed by a single individual, one Sreten Milisavljevic, M539 Restorations is a channel that publishes longform repair videos on older, neglected BMWs, spanning from complex V-10-powered M5s to simple E30-generation 320i coupes. The channel also regularly features V-12-powered BMWs from the Eighties and Nineties in various states of disrepair. Despite not having to rely on any of the normal car YouTuber crutches to produce content, it’s become one of the most entertaining channels for gearheads on the platform.
I first came across M539 Restorations when the YouTube algorithm fed me a video from the channel back in March 2020, right when the COVID-19 pandemic was taking off. It was a full 45-minute video covering the repair of an old manual 8-Series, just like the one I owned and wrote about on this website. From there I fell into a deep hole, curious to see what sorts of other projects the channel covered. I don’t think I’ve missed one upload since. I needed to know how M539 Restorations got here, and what made the channel so appealing to folks like me.
Like most of us, Milisavljevic, a Serbian national, became enamored with cars at a young age.
“I always liked cars, even when I was little,” Milisavljevic told Road & Track over the phone. “My dad used to take me to shows in Belgrade in the Nineties, and they brought all of the brand new cars and stuff, and I knew all of the brands. When I used to drive through the city, he could point to a car and I could tell him, “Okay, that’s a Mercedes, BMW, whatever.” And then I grew up, watched Top Gear like many of us did, and that just kind of grew the passion more and more.”
Milisavljevic made his way to Santa Barbara during his college years, which is when he got his first taste of the BMW ownership lifestyle.
“In Europe, you go everywhere, you just walk, you have good public transit, metros, trams and whatnot,” Milisavljevic says. “But [in the U.S.], you need a car. So, I always liked BMWs and I bought my first one in LA in Northridge, and it was an E39 530i, 2002. And it was a one-owner car, had 120,000-something miles, and I think the guy was asking four [thousand] or something like that. And back then I was still kind of smart, so I asked for a pre-purchase inspection, and it turns out it needed a little bit of work, had a bit of oil leak here and there, the front shocks were done. And I got him down to $2700.”
Like many of us, Milisavljevic couldn’t justify upkeep costs that would quickly eclipse the price of the car. So he turned to the internet for help. That’s when he learned how to wrench.
“[I] loved the car, but I couldn’t afford to do maintenance,” he told us. “I was still getting paid 18 bucks an hour. So, you can’t exactly drop 1000 bucks for labor to replace the front shocks. And so, I started doing small stuff, watching YouTube videos. I didn’t even know how to change the oil back then. So I started with oil changes, rear brakes, valve cover gaskets, belts, pulleys. I joined Bimmerforums and some other forums as well, posting over there, talking to people. Then I met a lot of friends and just soaked up the information, how to do stuff.”
From there Milisavljevic began buying and flipping BMWs as a pastime, refreshing the cars before he put them back to market, often generating solid profits in the process.
“I’d just basically do maintenance, make the car sorted, [get it to] pass smog, and then sell it,” he said. “And I think in the span of six to eight months I had 20 cars or so. But I wasn’t doing the standard flipping that everybody does in the U.S. You know, you buy a car, you flip it immediately for double, but you didn’t do anything on it. I just wanted the car to be really nice, sorted, and then I could sell it to someone else.”
Milisavljevic eventually graduated with a degree in IT, and secured a full-time position at the Santa Barbara hotel resort he’d been working at through college. He worked there for two years before the contract expired, and instead of staying and looking for another job, he decided to move to Germany to be with his longtime girlfriend.
“The first month [in Germany] was a living hell,” Milisavljevic said. “I had no job, no car. I was just really, really regretting it. And I actually had just bought a 330Ci ZHP in the U.S., a 6-speed manual silver car, beautiful, sorted, everything on it. And I wanted to bring it to Germany but it was really, really expensive to do that. And I was like, “I don’t have a job, I don’t really want to do that.” So, I sold it quickly. And then, since in IT, you can get a job easily anywhere, even if you don’t speak German. So, I got a job in Berlin.”
Milisavljevic picked up where he left off, buying BMWs, fixing minor things, and flipping them for a profit. After three years of working in IT and working on cars as a side hustle, his plan to break into YouTube began.
“I always liked watching YouTube and whenever I watched videos or something and I’m thinking, “Maybe I can do that a bit better. How would I do this or that?” And that’s when I bought a E38 750iL out of Dubai with the sole purpose of starting the YouTube channel.”
Milisavljevic learned quickly that not everyone can switch on the YouTube Voice and become instantly entertaining.
“I tried a couple of concepts and I realized in the beginning I was super uncomfortable in front of the camera,” he told us. “As soon as you pressed the record button, I’d immediately forget what I was about to say or how to talk or do this. It just looked really unnatural. So, I was like, “Okay, let’s scrap that. I’m just going to do what I do, fix the car and then in the voiceover I’m going to explain what I’m doing.””
The channel wasn’t an immediate success. Milisavljevic’s first few videos garnered no more than a few hundred views, with a subscriber count hovering in the single digits. But a combination of hard work and a lucky algorithm break eventually pushed him into the limelight.
“Right before New Year’s [2019], I think it was the 31st of December, I changed the thumbnail on a video, and in two days the video blew up. It got picked up by YouTube algorithm and in two days it had half a million views. It was just unbelievable to see something like that. I had 10,000 subscribers, people asking for more videos. “We like what you’re doing.” It was like, wow, this is crazy.”
And so more videos Milisavljevic made. He began purchasing more old BMWs and tackling bigger and bigger repair jobs. Eventually, he moved onto newer cars like E46 Tourings, E60 M5s, and E92 M3s. He even bought an X5 to repair on the channel. He’s gone from refreshing braking components to performing full engine rebuilds, despite never having undergone any formal training to be a mechanic.
“I just like to do things properly,” Milisavljevic told us. “Do it once, do it right. I don’t like doing things twice. I hate doing things twice. So, whenever I can, I just try to do it properly. I always research what I need to do because I don’t know anything. I don’t have mechanical knowledge. I never worked in a workshop.”
“So, if I need to, say replace the alternator on the X5, first I’m going to Google it, maybe watch a YouTube video as well,” Milisavljevic continued. “But then I’m also going to open a BMW repair manual, and just follow that step-by-step and do it properly as a technician would do it, just clean this, tighten that bolt to that spec and just do it that way. So, when I make videos, I try to catch that in the best possible way. And then I also goof around because I realize you have to keep the audience entertained as well. You can’t be serious all the time and just be like a robot. You have to goof around.”
Perhaps those are the reasons why M539 Restorations garners so many views. It’s not like he’s working on especially rare exotics, half-assing jobs in weird ways, or harping on how much all of the parts are costing him. A vast majority of the filming takes place inside a relatively small garage stuffed into an industrial part of Frankfurt—not exactly the most glamorous of locations. Explaining why M539 Restorations is so entertaining to someone who’s not into cars might seem nearly impossible. Yet if you’ve ever turned on a wrench on your own car, you’ll find it hard to turn away. He does the jobs he sets out to do with supreme accuracy without being achingly boring. And when he finally hits the Autobahn with the car you just watched get fixed for the past hour, the payoff is immense.
The success of M539 Restorations is proof you don’t need a massive budget, insanely exotic cars, or a highly specialized skill set to create meaningful, entertaining content that can help and inspire people.
“I want to help people to maintain their own cars,” Milisavljevic told us. “I get emails and messages constantly, people telling me, “Thank you. You’ve been a huge inspiration. I bought an E46 because of you. Now I’m using those videos to fix it myself.” That’s great to hear.”
Brian Silvestro Road & Track staff writer with a taste for high-mileage, rusted-out projects and amateur endurance racing.
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