Hey Greydog, thanks for the detailed advice!
Yeah, I figured the 'bad batch' type of thing affected the Which review. I actually found another review by Which on their site for the 5-series as a whole which contradicts the 5-series Touring review and says that the long term 3-8 years reliability is very good! At this point I began to get suspicious of these particular results in the review since one always wonders firstly how widespread they were in their scope (i.e just how many drivers they polled at that time) and secondly the bad batch factor. Trying to form cast iron metrics about any part of the motor industry is quite hard work I think and subject to annual fluctuations, bias, subjectivity etc etc. For these reasons I was more inclined to go with their general recommendation that BMW was one of the top manufacturers for reliability. I was still very grateful to Which though actually, as I would never had looked at BMW as I may have thought that they were too expensive to own and run. Well, ask me that again in a year because today...
...I took the plunge and bought an absolutely gorgeous 520d SE Touring machine! I had to pay 3k more than my original budget but I'm so glad I did because driving it back home tonight was a very happy experience indeed. It really lacks for nothing in my opinion and for a shade under 8k it's a huge amount a car. It's obviously been extremely well looked after and the services and MOTs seem to all be in order. I'll be getting a tow hitch fitted soon, so I'll take that opportunity to ask the engineers to give it a quick once over and check for any missing recalls. I didn't have time to organise a vehicle check prior to purchase as it was on at a very reasonable price and the dealer had had a lot of interest in it. Had I not bought it today, I would have lost the opportunity I think.
There are a few oddities which I need to get used to. One is that the turn indicator on the satnav is under the binnacle dials, which is nice if you are driving straight, but I was stationary one time with the steering wheel rotated ready to pull off at a roundabout and couldn't see the indication because the arms of the steering wheel were obscuring the view. Perhaps the turn instructions can be configured to appear on the main screen as well? Another oddity is that when breaking the car judders a little more than I would expect, like the breaks are being applied too aggresively - perhaps that is my fault on the pedal? Perhaps the break pads are very new? Perhaps there is an issue with the breaks/suspension. The dealer said he would fix anything that came up in the first three months, so now is the time to get these things ironed out.
It's an unknown beast to me, that I need to get to know. The computer side of it seems to be the most daunting. Couldn't even work out how to switch the screen off without locking the car! So many puzzles, I will need to spend time to read the manual. But it drives like a beast! For me the 3.0 would have been a bit overkill - I'm a fairly sedate driver TBH. 3.0's consumption is a bit higher and the insurance group is a bit higher. If I was a German salesman hammering my way down from one end of their country to the other on autobahns burning company fuel then I'd want a 3.0 but as it is my 4 cyclinder twin turbo 2.0 seems to be adequate enough, with sport mode to the rescue if I need to do some serious accelerating. For the foreseeable I'm not planning on towing anything too heavy, just a bike rack, so I think it can cope with anything I throw at it :-)
I'll get some photos together and post them onto the other intro forum.
Thanks again,
Woody.