BMW 530d SE Touring (2011) long-term test review
By the CAR road test team
Long Term Tests
A year in our BMW 530d Touring
Are we road testers too easily entranced by big luxury diesel estates? Over a misspent youth poring over car magazines, I remember reading of hacks falling for the charms of said vehicles in the 1980s. One colleague on another mag actually bid for his long-term BMW 330d Touring when he had to reluctantly hand the keys back. It seems as a breed we’re predisposed towards big, fast, comfy estate cars.
I’m not about to disappoint you. The new F11 BMW 5-series Touring was fabulous on many levels, if not quite perfect. It’s the sort of car whose sheer breadth of talents smacks your gob on a daily basis. We’ve already documented its high-speed transcontinental credentials, after it acted as pace car on Performance Car of the Year 2010 and actually beat the Ferrari 458 Italia on a marathon from Lyons to Calais. But the 5-series did the less glamorous stuff brilliantly too.
We’ve done the mandatory trips to tips, filled it with children on family duty and trudged into the office every day for nine months. The 530d never missed a beat and started first time, every time. It’s funny to think a few years ago we all oohed and ahhed when BMW removed keys from the start-up procedure, but all 5-series have keyless go as standard these days so you just thumb the button to get going. Annoyingly that’s not matched by keyless unlocking, so you still have to remove the key to unlock the doors before putting it back in your pocket and starting the car. Perhaps that’s BMW encouraging the upsell.
The 3.0-litre diesel engine is still a peach. I can’t think of a more refined engine in the executive class and until recently its figures were nigh-on unbeatable, but Audi and Merc have recently trumped it in some areas. Still, 245bhp, a torquey 398lb ft and 165g/km of CO2 are fine by me. Audi’s new A6 wagon 3.0 TDI now manages 156g/km, mind.
The straight six is at the heart of the experience: the 530d Touring will charge or cruise at will, and it’s impeccably tuned to the ZF eight-speed auto transmission. Before I became familiar with the gearbox, I’d feared such an over-geared cogfest would stumble between ratios like I do on my mountain bike; it doesn’t. Changes are creamy smooth and the spread of gears helps keep progress quiet and restful.
Our last 5-series long-termer – the massive but munting 530d Gran Turismo – suffered a pretty traumatic transmission fault when the auto ’box spat out torque converter bolts at speed on the A1. The same ’box in the Touring behaved perfectly. Nothing else fell off or went wrong in our 20,000 miles with the car.
Covering such a high mileage in a short space of time meant we had reason to visit a BMW dealer. We visited Cambridge Elms BMW, the newest Beemer garage in Britain. I can only imagine that the £7 million invested in it was spent with the same contractors who make trendy boutique Barcelona hotels, so clean and modernist were its lines. They serviced the car while I waited, nourished me with water and wifi and finished after 92 minutes, seconds within the allotted time. All very impressive, but they forgot to vacuum the boot and the service indicator wasn’t reset.
A couple of episodes during our ownership made us remember that owning a premium car needs a premium wallet. That first service – essentially a glorified oil change – cost us £247.69. We also had to change a tyre which developed a dangerous bulge, and replacing the Goodyear 245/40 R19 cost us a mildly upsetting £347. Playing at this level brings costs above and beyond the very reasonable fuel consumption.
That low CO2 figure is closely related to the 530d’s 44.1mpg claimed average. We all know the Government figures are produced in a laboratory in cloud cuckoo land, so how close did we get? I think it’s fair to say our 530d was driven enthusiastically and heavily laden some of the time, but the vast majority was just normal workaday journeys. We don’t all drive sideways at every roundabout (apart from Ben Barry. He does). Over the full nine-month stint we gobbled a gallon of diesel every 34 miles.
Trying to find faults in the 530d Touring is like trying to find nits in my son’s hair. One of the few things to annoy was the headlights, which we decided were a bit rubbish. It wasn’t just our 5-series; Barry drove a 520d from Wales to the office and came back complaining too.
The spread pattern seemed to be set for left-hookers, cutting off abruptly on the nearside verge as if to avoid dazzling non-existent oncomers. The result was a black patch just to the left of your vision, which became a problem on rural left-handers. This is doubly disappointing since our car had the £1210 Visibility package, which included automatic adaptive xenon headlights, headlight wash and high-beam assistant. Neither Sycamore Peterborough nor Elms Cambridge could find anything wrong.
Our car famously had the kitchen sink added to its spec, carrying £16,900 in extras. The best was the £940 head-up display – don’t order a 5-series without it – but many I could’ve done without. Especially when our inflated £56,300 new price plummeted a /grand/ in value every 1000 miles. Parkers Price Guide reckons we’d be offered £33,495 in part-exchange and a main dealer would sell it on for around £38k.
So let that be a warning before you go rampant on the options list. But there’s little else to warn you about. The 5-series was a brilliant all-rounder. They may have surgically removed some of the lithe sporting exec from the character of the new Five, but the brutal truth is they’ve probably made it more appealing to more of the market as a result.
What hasn’t changed is the relentless BMW attention to detail that permeates the Touring. The whole thing feels immaculately built inside and out, and it scrubbed up brilliantly. I love the engineered feeling of the major and minor controls in BMWs, from classy tick-tock of indicator to metered precision of throttle. Only Porsche does it as well. Which is part of the reason why – true to form – every single member of staff lusts after something just like this in their dream garage.
By Tim Pollard
Long Term Tests
A year in our BMW 530d Touring
Are we road testers too easily entranced by big luxury diesel estates? Over a misspent youth poring over car magazines, I remember reading of hacks falling for the charms of said vehicles in the 1980s. One colleague on another mag actually bid for his long-term BMW 330d Touring when he had to reluctantly hand the keys back. It seems as a breed we’re predisposed towards big, fast, comfy estate cars.
I’m not about to disappoint you. The new F11 BMW 5-series Touring was fabulous on many levels, if not quite perfect. It’s the sort of car whose sheer breadth of talents smacks your gob on a daily basis. We’ve already documented its high-speed transcontinental credentials, after it acted as pace car on Performance Car of the Year 2010 and actually beat the Ferrari 458 Italia on a marathon from Lyons to Calais. But the 5-series did the less glamorous stuff brilliantly too.We’ve done the mandatory trips to tips, filled it with children on family duty and trudged into the office every day for nine months. The 530d never missed a beat and started first time, every time. It’s funny to think a few years ago we all oohed and ahhed when BMW removed keys from the start-up procedure, but all 5-series have keyless go as standard these days so you just thumb the button to get going. Annoyingly that’s not matched by keyless unlocking, so you still have to remove the key to unlock the doors before putting it back in your pocket and starting the car. Perhaps that’s BMW encouraging the upsell.
The 3.0-litre diesel engine is still a peach. I can’t think of a more refined engine in the executive class and until recently its figures were nigh-on unbeatable, but Audi and Merc have recently trumped it in some areas. Still, 245bhp, a torquey 398lb ft and 165g/km of CO2 are fine by me. Audi’s new A6 wagon 3.0 TDI now manages 156g/km, mind.
The straight six is at the heart of the experience: the 530d Touring will charge or cruise at will, and it’s impeccably tuned to the ZF eight-speed auto transmission. Before I became familiar with the gearbox, I’d feared such an over-geared cogfest would stumble between ratios like I do on my mountain bike; it doesn’t. Changes are creamy smooth and the spread of gears helps keep progress quiet and restful.
Our last 5-series long-termer – the massive but munting 530d Gran Turismo – suffered a pretty traumatic transmission fault when the auto ’box spat out torque converter bolts at speed on the A1. The same ’box in the Touring behaved perfectly. Nothing else fell off or went wrong in our 20,000 miles with the car.
Covering such a high mileage in a short space of time meant we had reason to visit a BMW dealer. We visited Cambridge Elms BMW, the newest Beemer garage in Britain. I can only imagine that the £7 million invested in it was spent with the same contractors who make trendy boutique Barcelona hotels, so clean and modernist were its lines. They serviced the car while I waited, nourished me with water and wifi and finished after 92 minutes, seconds within the allotted time. All very impressive, but they forgot to vacuum the boot and the service indicator wasn’t reset.
A couple of episodes during our ownership made us remember that owning a premium car needs a premium wallet. That first service – essentially a glorified oil change – cost us £247.69. We also had to change a tyre which developed a dangerous bulge, and replacing the Goodyear 245/40 R19 cost us a mildly upsetting £347. Playing at this level brings costs above and beyond the very reasonable fuel consumption.
That low CO2 figure is closely related to the 530d’s 44.1mpg claimed average. We all know the Government figures are produced in a laboratory in cloud cuckoo land, so how close did we get? I think it’s fair to say our 530d was driven enthusiastically and heavily laden some of the time, but the vast majority was just normal workaday journeys. We don’t all drive sideways at every roundabout (apart from Ben Barry. He does). Over the full nine-month stint we gobbled a gallon of diesel every 34 miles.
Trying to find faults in the 530d Touring is like trying to find nits in my son’s hair. One of the few things to annoy was the headlights, which we decided were a bit rubbish. It wasn’t just our 5-series; Barry drove a 520d from Wales to the office and came back complaining too.
The spread pattern seemed to be set for left-hookers, cutting off abruptly on the nearside verge as if to avoid dazzling non-existent oncomers. The result was a black patch just to the left of your vision, which became a problem on rural left-handers. This is doubly disappointing since our car had the £1210 Visibility package, which included automatic adaptive xenon headlights, headlight wash and high-beam assistant. Neither Sycamore Peterborough nor Elms Cambridge could find anything wrong.
Our car famously had the kitchen sink added to its spec, carrying £16,900 in extras. The best was the £940 head-up display – don’t order a 5-series without it – but many I could’ve done without. Especially when our inflated £56,300 new price plummeted a /grand/ in value every 1000 miles. Parkers Price Guide reckons we’d be offered £33,495 in part-exchange and a main dealer would sell it on for around £38k.
So let that be a warning before you go rampant on the options list. But there’s little else to warn you about. The 5-series was a brilliant all-rounder. They may have surgically removed some of the lithe sporting exec from the character of the new Five, but the brutal truth is they’ve probably made it more appealing to more of the market as a result.
What hasn’t changed is the relentless BMW attention to detail that permeates the Touring. The whole thing feels immaculately built inside and out, and it scrubbed up brilliantly. I love the engineered feeling of the major and minor controls in BMWs, from classy tick-tock of indicator to metered precision of throttle. Only Porsche does it as well. Which is part of the reason why – true to form – every single member of staff lusts after something just like this in their dream garage.
By Tim Pollard
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BMW 530d SE Touring,
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