browellm

Dennis, you simply have no foundation whatsoever to make a claim like that. Extra stars have been gained through louder seat belt chimes, for heaven's sake.

CATA

I want to highlight some of the forthcoming euro ncap changes:
- introduction of the 6 star
- raising the speed at which the tests are made.
The purpose is to match the results with real life conditions.
The correlation with the actual situation of e60 makes things a bit complicated.

Gizmo

Dennis, you simply have no foundation whatsoever to make a claim like that. Extra stars have been gained through louder seat belt chimes, for heaven's sake.
[/quote]

Gee whiz ... I have re-read his post, and he clearly stated that this was merely his OPINION.

Others (maybe yourself?) appear to be of the OPINION that the E60 is safe no matter the star rating achieved in these tests.

Were it not for your last point, BMW might have recieved a 2 star rating, a prospect I find somewhat chilling indeed.

"for heaven's sake" ... Was that a Freudian slip, as we discuss safety, or the lack of it, in our vehicles !!!

kscarrol

Dennis, you simply have no foundation whatsoever to make a claim like that. Extra stars have been gained through louder seat belt chimes, for heaven's sake.
[/quote]

Gee whiz ... I have re-read his post, and he clearly stated that this was merely his OPINION.

Others (maybe yourself?) appear to be of the OPINION that the E60 is safe no matter the star rating achieved in these tests.

Were it not for your last point, BMW might have recieved a 2 star rating, a prospect I find somewhat chilling indeed.

"for heaven's sake" ... Was that a Freudian slip, as we discuss safety, or the lack of it, in our vehicles !!!
[/quote]

Come on Gizmo, the reference to the louder chime is clearly in reference to the X5 episode, a real occurance, not some speculative episode on the E60. Just as Dennis has every right to his opinion, browellm has the right to his. These are the type of posts I'm referring to when I say the thread is beginning to take a RF smell...

300TTto545

I'd just like to put my $.02 as nearly everyone else has....

My background is a General Surgeon. Trained at a level one trauma center - left 6 months ago.

For all the hype and talk about safety and different car designs, the feeling at the trauma surgeon level is that it is a lot of hype and talk. Airbags are great. Seatbelts even better. But crumple zones, collapsable this and that. Makes a small difference at the margins. In most car accidents, the speed, restraint status and whether a rollover occurs far and away determine who dies or is otherwise injured.

50,000 Americans die each year in the US from car accidents. Probably 500 to 1,000 would be eliminated if everyone drove a large 5 star car. That is probably a high estimate. Everyone has heard anecdotal evidence - "they died because they were in a Pinto or that accident was terrible but since it was a Volvo, they walked away without a scratch". None of the evidence out there suggests that car design makes that much of a difference in real world accidents. 95% of the time the outcome is predetermined.

The vast majority of improvement in the mortality over the last 10 years (and that is per mile driven since the overall rate is pretty steady) has been to increased airbags and seatbelt use - IMHO. Seatbelt warnings for all the criticism probably do more than other safety measures.

I am in the camp that believes that if there was a significant safety issue then a recall would be likely. The lawyers in the US would have a field day and bankrupt BMWNA if that didn't happen. I personally don't think that there is one. I do think that BMW should release the modifications and let us judge if they are significant. The e60 is the safest car that I have ever driven.

How many of the paranoid believed what 60 minutes and the NHTSA said about Audi in the 80s?

Not wanting to start a cross-Atlantic war here but is it the NCAP (or the EC in general) that is starting with these ridiculous pedestrian safety standards? I read part of the NCAP and there were critical of the lack of pedestrian safety measures on the E60. In the US - this is absolutely ridiculous. The vast majority of pedestrians killed in accidents are intoxicated (80% is what memory serves). So lets spend billions of dollars making cars ugly and less fuel efficient to protect those that won't protect themselves....

JohanDC

Yes, I've seen pictures of an E60 crash (I think it was a pre-production model) something like 1 year ago where the driver (firefighter going to work) did not survive the crash, those pictures were really ugly!

JohanDC

You're right that the NCAP tests will issue ratings for pedestrians but they are not included in the star rating that a car receives.

The Pentium Guy

Wow this thread is going large.
I hope that munich is reading this..haha

I don't mean to agitate the flame war, but paying nearly $50k for a car and not getting close to perfection is a problem. Sure, this is a problem that not some of us could care less about, but - as long as BMW decides to take action against this problem, I'm ok with it. I mean, for paying that much for a car they need to attend to the needs of the customer, and judging from the size of the thread (sorry I didn't read the entire thing)... 14 pages, it seems like a lot of people care about this.

-The Penitum Guy

Iceman

Well, we don't know WHAT changes they made to those parts, so we don't know the facts. We just know someting got changed, and it makes us think that it could be serious.

I think 1-3 stars is unsafe, since even cheap Japanese or French cars get five stars. I don't trust them more or less than anybody else. That's why I would like to see the actual results of the first test.




The greates BS I've ever heard!
The parts affected are not different in the US...




Ah, well... You can't compare that with the crash test, since that crash was nothing ANY car manufacturer ever tests! He had his accident in the wrong spot. And it was a pre-production car!!

EBMCS03

Hummm from the looks of it... I dont think any car would have survived that... A pillers and B Pillers cant hold up to that kind of impact...