Rumor: New BMW 5-series-Not crash worthy?

Dear 001,

According to my sources in Germany, backed up by British magazine "Autocar", the latest BMW 5-series has not done well in the European NCAP crash tests. Rather than give the car a safety rating of 3 (no better than a wet cardboard box) the engineers pulled the "5" from the testing station citing "technical problems" and arranging to return another day. The real problem is that some people believe there are allegedly intrinsic design faults in the chassis of that car, and merely adding high tensile steel, magnesium or carbon fibre bits will not fix the problem.

The Munich Eunuch

Have any readers heard of this potential problem or have any more insight?

001

p.s. Other readers are now confirming the AutoCar story

jimmyriddle69 - 9/24/2004 2:22:49 AM

+1 Boost

A similar article is also in 18th September copy of UK mag Autocar, I am reading it now. They also suggest that the BMW has some faults. Autocar would be sued out of existance in the UK for saying this, so there must be some truth in the story. I work for a media company and called BMW head office, but their press office "would not comment". That's a bad sign, especially as all NCAP data is public domain in Europe so they couldn't deny it anyway.