New Purchase - advice needed

[Dave29]

Hi,

Just sold a venerable Discovery 3 after 7 years and 140k miles. After looking at the options to replace, settled on an X5, but must confess to not knowing a huge amount about them

Budget is about £20k, so looking at a 2011/12 M Sport with circa 60k miles I believe.

Keen to understand things like:

- 3.0 vs 4.0?
- major spec items to seek out (or avoid)?
- things to look out for on viewing?
- any forum members cars coming up for sale?
- thoughts on reliability and longevity of the X5 (especially vs. the Discovery)?

...plus basically anything else that might be relevant..

Look forward to hearing from you and  (hopefully) joining the forum as an owner soon

Thanks
Dave

[Mr black]

Hi Dave
I’ve just bought a 2011 40d coming from an x3.
We love it and these are the options I have that make it for us.
Sunroof
Pro sat nav sounds fantastic
All round cameras
All the usual spec which is a lot

I’d definitely look to make sure it has the star marked runflats
When warm do some full lock slow turns like you would in a car park to test the transfer box and generally try everything like you would with any 2nd hand purchase.
I’m sure you will get plenty of advice on here.
I’m sure there are a couple for sale on here to.

Good luck

[X5Sport]

Remember that a 3.0 and a 4.0 are both 3-litre engines just with either single (30d) or twin (35d/40d) or triple (50d) turbos.  BMWs numbering system stopped making sense a while back  ::)

The 40d is IMHO the best compromise as it is plenty fast enough, though to be a ‘hooligan’ the 50d is the choice (in the nicest sense of course).

[Dave29]

[quote="Mr black"]

I’d definitely look to make sure it has the star marked runflats
[/quote]

tell me more about what 'star marked' means

I've always looked to swap out of run flats on previous BMWs...does that advice still hold on the X5?

[X5Sport]

XDrive cars with staggered wheelsets are very intolerant of mismatched rolling radii on tyres.  BMW (and others) have tyre sets made with matched sizes for cars with staggered tyre sizes on the axles.  If the circumference is more than a couple of mm different front to rear you get transmission wind up and shattered diffs or transfer boxes.

In BMWs case, these approved tyres have an asterisk on the sidewall and should be changed as a full set, not singly or by axle.  Merc and Audi do the same and from comments on a Škoda Forum, the same problem is now showing up on the 4x4 Superb 3 car.  It doesn’t happen to everyone but is becoming more frequently reported as these cars age and putting the right tyres on becomes a harder decision to support, but ignore it at your peril.

One member on here bought tyres of the correct size, but not ‘*’ marked and the circumferences were more than 30mm different per revolution which caused problems until the tyres were replaced.

This problem does not seem to occur on cars which have the same sizes (wheel & tyre) all round.

Jerkiness at low speed on full lock is a giveaway symptom, along with groaning and grinding noises from the driveline.

It doesn’t matter whether they are RFT or not, the ‘*’ mark is important.

[Dave29]

thanks - helpful stuff

any more buying advice?

strong views on 3.0 vs. 4.0?

[Barroni]

Best bet is have a drive in both and see what you like best.

I personally only wanted the 40D as its got better performance and due to low emissions was actually cheaper to tax. 40D will obviously be more to insure so you might wanna check out the difference. 

245 BHP V 306 BHP.  0-60 in 6.6 seconds for the 40d - some boy racers have been left eating dust lol.

I wanted to stretch to the X50D with 380 BHP but they were just too new and out of my price range.