mooney058

Happy B-day to my E60! Bellow are my highlight of owning this machine for 5 years:

1. Excellent motorway car - brought me almost only joy on long drives - stability, power, predictability . One not so great thing - standard seats which are worse than majority standard seats on other cars (the ones I recall are - audi a6 and a4, toyota avensis, mazda3 and many other)

2. City driving - enjoyable, but ride if too firm for the city for my liking. Second generation RFTs are not absolute evil for me.

3. Service history (in Belgium) - terrible :thumbsdown: . Such a bad service puts me off buying another BMW:
- after first oil change engine started to consume a lot of oil, engine subsequently replaced only after 35.000 km (luckily bmw agreed to pay for it)
- each time car was left at dealer's garage - new problems occurred, faulty engine coolant temperature sensor (12 EUR) actually set me down to plus 700 EUR, numerous visits to dealer and 8 months to fix ... incompetent bastards

4. Overall impressions - very good car with lousy service in Belgium. I read nice reviews of the F10, but would never like to experience Belgian BMW service ... Sorry BMW, here I come Audi. It is kind of pity, since 4 of my last cars were BMWs, but I really do not want to buy an expensive car and face terrible service. Till approx 2008 I gladly recommended BMW to my friends and colleagues, but recently I advised them to look for alternatives and to buy BMW only after careful consideration of other alternatives.

safetywork

That is ashame that you receive such poor service that you'd buy another brand despite being happy with the car itself. I hope someone from BMW is on these forums.

Ellicit

++

Howitzer

That's really too bad. One of my friends is a master BMW technician for motor werks in Barrington. He told me that I was very lucky to have purchased the 2004 530 because it had the old 5 series engine; the M54B30. He said that the new 5 series engines are in the shop for service more times than he can count with problems. He said that the new BMW models were created with a lot of cost-cutting parts and once you get into the LCI versions its even worse. This surprised me considering LCI cars are 2008 and up. Less than 2 years of use and already "issues" (what issues I really didn't delve into). All I know is my car is quite a base model... no sport package, no ARS, no NAV, which basically means my car doesn't have that much more computer faults that could occur. To me, that means a better, more reliable car in the long-haul. These new BMWs have so many computers its mind-boggling.

I like a car to be an engine on wheels. I could care less about tons of other electronic features as long as it is sexy on the outside, drives great, and has things like power windows, door locks, seats, alarm, heat/air, and a decent radio!

TMQ

Are you saying the N52 is not reliable? any evidence?

bmwf1

Howitzer ++++ on the less options, less sh*t to break. TMQ ++++++++++++++++ on the picture

mooney058

In my case my engine started to consume oil after first oil change at circa 20.000 km. there were no issues at all before oil change. After visit to garage and oil change I had to top-up 1L of oil firstly after 2000km, then 1800km, 1500km and then 1100 km ... after some arguing, dealer contacted bmw and engine was replaced at the cost of bmw. Coincidence or not, but oil consumption started after visit to the dealer. They manage to brake several parts while changing the engine as well. I am not convinced it is bmw fault, I tend to believe it is rather handling and 'service' by the garage...

higher

You make a great point and it's obvious to me after driving BMW for over 10 years that the E60 / 61 was created to a 'price point' and much of the solid build of the older models had dissapeared.

That's why I can't understand the strength of liking for the E60 / 61 over the F10 / F11. From my experience owning a 2008 E61 and test driving the 5GT / F10 the new model is so much more solid and less 'price-point' driven, even with the less 'edgy' styling.

From my perspective I feel that much of this 'cost-pressure' falls to Chris Bangles designs' like leaving out oil dipstick, too much electronic management, etc, etc Of course, BMW management has something to do with this decision too and I know there is a lot postitive sentiment for Bangles design on here...and my less liking of them... even though I drive one.

Simply put, some of the minor and major problem I had with my car, in end come down to poor design, lack of adquate testing or price pressure on manufacturer.

safetywork

I don't know if you could put this on Bangle, I thought he was just the designer and had nothing to do with the engineering aspect of the cars. I could be wrong though. Perhaps this should be blamed on "Life Cycle Engineers" who's job is to produce product just so it would go bad after certain hours of use.

TMQ

I agree, the design has nothing to do with engine or electronics reliability.

So far I have not heard anyone else complaining about the N52 engine, and most complaints about the E60 seem to be related to the N54 HPFP related issues that BMW can't seem to figure out, and that the battery charge can go low if you don't drive the vehicle long or often enough (notably the LCI models).