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And the continuation of he BMW warranty.
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It's got 15000 miles. I've earmarked a 520d m sport as my next car. This is without doubt a good deal. However, I'm still happy with the Pug, it's been faultless, so I'll probably wait till it's nearer three years old and go for a BMW with the new engine.
(Repeat another 100 times)
As for my job and car choice. I get plenty of opportunity to drive high powered cars at high speed at work. At home I just want a nice looking, comfortable, adequately powered motor. Two growing kids mean another coupe is out the window and a five series would fit the bill nicely!
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I get plenty of opportunity to drive high powered cars at high speed at work.
The child in me resents the utter unfairness of that while the adult, of course, recognises the need!!
Sounds like a very nice car, kind of fancy the Touring version of that one day myself. I think you are itching too ?! Won't be long before you are casually dropping the odd hint into the dinner conversation that a bit more space would be nice and the kids would be more comfortable and there are some great deals going at the moment....... and so on I'll bet !
Oh well, three cars to wash, better not put it off any more.........
:-(
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I really want a 520d too...
PU - I won't tell you what you can get an 08 plate 530d with Efficient Dynamics for now.
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Don't. The bright side is that Mrs P made me sell the 535d before the world went into meltdown. I console myself with that thought quite often.
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I skimmed Peter Dron's - I won't call it a press release - on the new 7 series in the Telegraph yesterday. It has (as an optional extra Dron says is essential) trick rear-wheel steering that turns in the opposite direction to the front wheels on slow corners reducing the turning circle by 27 inches, and at higher speeds turns under electronic control 'up to 3 degrees' in the same direction as the front wheels, to counteract the thing's natural oversteer I suppose.
All tremendously clever of course, and I would love to try one. But I will have to remember never to be tempted to buy an old knackered one or even a new one come to that.
Conventional suspension using nothing but links, springs, bushes and dampers, depending on wheel control and correct geometry to keep the car on the road and make it behave predictably, has reached more than satisfactory levels of development.
Seems to me BMW is becoming vainglorious, gilding refined gold (BMW is not alone in this of course). Ingenious, but a bit decadent, a sign of excessive wealth in the presumed customers. If I were feeling rude I might mention Heath Robinson.
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I have recently driven an auto 325D '08' plate (the 3 litre smaller turbo one) and I have to say I cannot believe how quick it was, absolute rocket ship, even in the auto, very impressed. The only thing I could fault was the cockpit felt a bit too snug, so it would have to be the '5' series.
would well and truly walk all over the older ('04' plate from memory) 530D i've driven before
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Tried a 335i petrol ? I have - serious car, near perfect engine, everything is in the right place, dynamcally - Arguably the best car in any class - almost a spiritual successor to the old 5 series.
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i know i'm a Jag man, but I will concede the BMW marque is most impressive
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>>to counteract the thing's natural oversteer I suppose.
No.
No modern car naturally oversteers.
Cars can be provoked to oversteer, but, on neutral throttle, understeer is what all modern cars do.
The four wheel steering is aimed at overcoming one of the more fundamental limitations cars face. With mechanical steering of the front wheels, once the wheelbase is known, the relationship between yaw and lateral motion of the car is fixed. This is quite poor.
At low speed, you want much more yaw, and at high speeds, you want much less - in fact, for a high speed lane change, you probably want no yaw at all, and the car to just move sideways.
Obviously, the best thing would be to have all 4 wheels doing their own thing under computer control, but I suspect we won't be seeing anything so close to optimal for quite some time.
>>has reached more than satisfactory levels of development.
So, we should just stop there, and be happy? Come off it Lud! I'm sure people said something similar about their horses and carts 100+ years ago.
Actually, this is so fundamental, and so commonly misunderstood, it bears being repeated - No modern car naturally oversteers.
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It's been done before, on old Honda Preludes and Mazda 626s - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering
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No modern car naturally oversteers.
What you mean is that modern suspension design reduces or eliminates or disguises any tendency the basic four-wheeled trolley might have to oversteer. And of course not just suspension, there are these electronic thingies that detect all the forces and reduce power, sometimes just to certain wheels, and even apply the brakes one at a time as required for a nanosecond or so to prevent Mr Toad from St John's Wood from stuffing his 70 grand cruiser up the scenery in a moment of elation...
I can't help admiring this stuff NC just like you - no Luddite, me - but I can't help wondering how it is maintained when a few years old. Renewing bushes, dampers and springs is one thing, but rich-guy radical dependency on some tooth-sucking villain at the main dealer is something that could easily pall in moments of flinching economic management, even for rich guys I mean. Some quite pure and simple (in these sort of terms anyway) cars are very satisfactory, indeed verging on the perfect in some cases.
You probably don't mind the Eurobox getting heavier and smaller inside to keep pace with its advancing driveline efficiency, but I damn well do.
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These threads don't 'alf go off topic quickly these days!!!
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>>What you mean is that modern suspension design reduces or eliminates or disguises
No, not really. What I'm getting at is that the combination of a vehicle's weight distribution, and the cornering stiffness* of its tyres will, under neutral throttle, lead the slip angles at the front to be greater than those at the rear, hence, understeer. No electronic trickery required.
* cornering stiffness - the relationship between side-force and slip angle; for a given vertical load, camber, and tyre pressure, it's a property of the tyre.
What the advanced electronics can do is to allow a vehicle manufacturer to build in less of an understeer margin.
>>but I can't help wondering how it is maintained when a few years old.
I've heard naysayers and doom-mongerers on all subjects dating back to closed circuit crankcase ventilation. People "thought" that recycling engine fumes into the manifold would reduce engine life. Of course, by sealing the crankcase, engine life actually increased!
How much maintenance and costly work have the electronics which manage the engine on your Escort cost you over the years? A lot less than the equivalent points and carb set-up I would wager!
>>You probably don't mind the Eurobox getting heavier and smaller inside
No, of course, it's a travesty.
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slip angles at the front to be greater than those at the rear hence understeer. No electronic trickery required.
No, it isn't required. Nevertheless it is supplied, or available, on some cars.
I am not being a 'prophet of doom'. I just know from experience that complex and subtle electro-mechanical systems that function on the undersides of cars, in among and playing a part in their suspension and steering - heavy-duty crucial systems that have to be failsafe or as near as possible but are subject to shocks and vibration all the time the car is moving, often in a spray or mist of liquid mud and salt - are going to cost a bomb to fix sooner or later, and we know that that is an open-ended bomb, that no one is contractually committed to doing it properly, at minimum expense and with maximum dispatch. And you know it too, so stop trying to make out that I am resisting progress. A lot of this stuff sold to the general public is flimflam, not progress. Fashion carp.
Cars NC, not damn Treen fairy bikes.
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In the case of rear wheel steering, I don't see that there's that much technical risk. Electric PAS has now gone through the difficult development type phase, and is now quite reliable. The only additions are;
1) to drive the motor via computer control rather than switching by sensing steering column torque. (When you consider the complexity of the technology that's required to sense steering column torque, putting the motor under the control of a computer is not a difficult step.)
2) to add a feedback sensor which tells th computer how far the rear steering rack has actually moved.
3) to add an ECU. As we know, ECUs are hugely reliable, and any faults are more likely to be found in the wiring, the earths, and the connectors.
>>A lot of this stuff sold to the general public is flimflam, not progress.
Quite a lot of what goes into a modern car, I agree, is flim flam, but, I think rear wheel steering is an obvious step which overcomes some of the limitations in our current rather agricultural steering systems, and is a vital step towards the technical demonstration and public acceptance of computer controlled steering of all 4 wheels independently. Like all other aspects of vehicle control, from ignition advance to anti-lock braking, I'm sure that a computer will do a much better job of it than 99% of us do for 99% of the time.
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