I have a BMW 530i SE Touring, purchased new in April of the year.  Are
there any known issues/faults on UK models that I should be watching
out for while the car is still in warranty?   I don't want to be
caught out as I was last time when I only found out about the known
issue of 'premature bore wear' on my earlier 320 after the extended
warranty had expired, in spite of always having the car serviced at a
franchised dealer (who of course never mentioned the problem until it
was too late).

---

Request for Question Clarification by aditya2k-ga on 15 Nov 2002 03:03 PST

I went through a few websites, message boards, and usenet. There have
been no negative comments yet

Hi Michael2, 

Since the short answer to your question in my opinion is;
"There are no known problems as far as I can see", I thought it would
be better to explain, why I believe that there are not any problems
with the vehicle model.

Taking a less specific example, If we search "Ford Escort" and
Problems into a search, Google comes up with 2380 hits. The first few
are related to Ford Escort/Orion 1.6 and reveal known problems such as
the unstable 'Idle Speed'.

Using "Vauxhall" problems reveals hits on known issues with Astra,
Calibra and Cavelier.

In fact you can use this strategy for most vehicle manufacturers and
it will generally come up with a heading on the hits "Vehicle - Known
Problems"

You can narrow the search further by narrowing to a UK search. 

As each search you do will reveal the known problems about the
particular make and model of the vehicle from many different sources,
consumer sites, garages, watchdogs, etc, we know that the strategy
works.

People complain, that is what we are best at so any time that there is
a product failure or design flaw, as you will see from the test
searches above, it is reported.

I also cross referenced this with searches on Lycos and Ask Jeeves and
had much the same results.

The question in hand
********************

Using this strategy as the basis for a search, I started with
combinations of "BMW" known problems - "BMW problems" "BMW" Design
problems and in each case searched within the results to narrow down
the number of hits, with keywords such as
"complaints","returns","flaws".

At the same time, I searched within each of the results for "BMW",BMW
530","BMW 530i","BMW 530i SE" and finally "BMW 530i SE Tourer"

So as you can see, I tried every possible combination that would yield
information or news on any suspected or reported problems with this
model of vehicle.

As a final check, I did contact the local but quite large BMW
dealership's service department who said that they haven't heard of
any problems with that model.

In fact the only reference I could find was on a much older K-reg BMW
530.

HonestJohn
http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/?f=1&t=87

Summary
*******
After an exhaustive search, my conclusion is that there are no known
design issues or flaws with the make and model of the vehicle that you
have.


Additional Links
****************

You may find this road test of your vehicle interesting as apart from
cramped cockpit space in comparison with the Mercedes, it would appear
it got quite a seal of approval.

BBC Top Gear
http://www.topgear.com/servlet/tg?DEST=/content/jsp/individualRoadTest.jsp&EVENT=1010&MAKE=BMW:A4&MODEL=5%20Series:E3&roadTestNumber=14.html


I hope that this helps to put your mind at rest. 


Johnny Phoenix

Yes it does, thank you.