Soldato
Well after just under 2 years of owning it my BMW 335D M Sport Saloon has gone as of today. It was a great car to own, being pretty quick, good to drive and reasonably comfortable but with my 2 girls getting bigger it was starting to prove a little small in the back for longer journeys.
Its been an arduous task testing everything I could think of which feel into my price bracket and meet the requirements stipulated by work for my car allowance as my wife will attest too...
So what have we tried? In no particular order
Audi A5 Sportback 3.0 TDI Quatro S-Line S-Tronic
Really liked this to drive and was plenty big enough, with a decent boot and being only a 4 seater had tons of room in the back. The gearbox was great and well suited to the 3.0 TDI engine, with seamless shifts and Quattro gave it a very sure-footed drive even in bloody awful conditions like those when I tested it. Not slow by any means but definitely didn’t fall into the performance same brackets as the 335D.
Issues I found with it were the specs of the available cars, they are all over the place, with some cars having had the majority of the options list dropped on them to other missing silly things like Bluetooth and satnav. The pricing is also massively variable and doesn’t always reflect the spec of the cars. Had a very bad experience with my local dealer when I’d arranged a test drive which also put me off somewhat, even after trying another dealer it left a bad taste…
BMW 5 F10 Series 530D/535D
Didn’t even drive it, dealers are useless, having tried 3 or 4 locally and my experience since owning the 335D just reinforced my previous thoughts based on my 330D ownership back in 2003-2004. To be honest the styling even on the M Sport has gone very very safe, with it just looking dull. Interior is nice but unless the car has the full electric seats I just can’t get comfortable or into a position where I can see clearly round the B pillar. My wife has also vowed never to own another so that didn’t help matters.
Mercedes E Class Saloon/Coupe
We had a good experience with the local Merc dealer, where they were very helpful and willing to let us try dropping car seats into the demos etc and drove the E350 CDI version of both the saloon and coupe. To drive they were both pretty decent, good gearbox which was well matched to the engine and very smooth. Interior felt a bit hit and miss quality wise, with some of the plastics feeling like they’d not be out of place being used for the kids seats in schools.
The exterior of the saloon, is great until you get to the rear quarter and then its just rubbish and it looks under wheeled (if that makes sense), so we discounted that. Space in the coupe was decent, not as good as the A5, and it looked better than the saloon, but as a package we just didn’t like it that much.
Jaguar XF
Jaguar HO emailed me at the start of this year offering me a drive in the XJ, which they had to twist my arm soooo hard to get me agree to you wouldn’t believe
Turned up at our local dealer and they basically gave us the keys, to a fully spec’d 3.0 DS PL showed us the basics and said come back before we close tonight (we arrived at 10.30…)
We ended up going back mid afternoon, as we had to take one of my girls to a party and got talking to the sales person. Explained to him that 52K was a bit out of our price range at the moment, regardless of how much we loved the car, so we got talking about the XF.
We’ve liked the XF from launch and have driven it on a number of occasions but the prices have stayed pretty strong for the 3.0 D or DS with a decent spec so hadn’t really been looking at them that closely for a while. We knew we loved the interior and exterior design and how it drove but they let us drive a car anyway which confirmed which re-enforced what we previously had thought but we decided to go back and test the A5 again just to “make sure”. At that stage we concluded that the XF just was the “right” car for us, if we could find one in the right colour combination and the right spec.
So we sat down with sales guy at the local dealer and went through a few options and the colours etc we’d want on the car and the monthly figure we needed to hit and basically left him to it. He called back at the start of the next week with a car he had in group stock which was pretty close to the spec we wanted so I asked him to run some numbers, but they didn’t get into the right ball park. So he promised to keep looking and come back to me if something came up.
In the meantime we went to a couple of other dealers, all of which treated us in a similar manor, but not as good as the local one, and looked at a few options they had but never got into the right ballpark number wise or just not quite right spec wise. We continued to trawl the jaguar used car site and autotrader and each time we found something which looked right it had been sold or the dealer came back with stupid offers on the BMW making it not viable.
During this time the local dealer phoned us a few times with some options, but never ones which were right, either being not quite the right spec or wrong colour combos, until that is last Thursday…
He managed to find us an ex-Jaguar management car which was the right colour combination and had the perfect spec on it. He gave us a very strong price on the BMW and the monthly number was under budget…
So today we picked up a Jaguar XF 3.0 D S Premium Luxury in Ultimate Black, with Warm Charcoal and Piano Black interior, with the Bowers and Wilkins Stereo, parking pack, blind spot monitors, sports interior pack and aero pack and to say I’m a little bit chuffed would be a HUGEEEEE understatement.
I’ll post some pictures up tomorrow as by the time I got home with it it was dark but on the short journey we’ve had in it so far it feels so much nicer than the BMW and on par if not a little quicker. The Jaguar dealers have grasped the term Customer Service and really taken it to heart, unlike some of the other so called premium brands and I've got nothing but good things to say about the ones near me.
Its been an arduous task testing everything I could think of which feel into my price bracket and meet the requirements stipulated by work for my car allowance as my wife will attest too...
So what have we tried? In no particular order
Audi A5 Sportback 3.0 TDI Quatro S-Line S-Tronic
Really liked this to drive and was plenty big enough, with a decent boot and being only a 4 seater had tons of room in the back. The gearbox was great and well suited to the 3.0 TDI engine, with seamless shifts and Quattro gave it a very sure-footed drive even in bloody awful conditions like those when I tested it. Not slow by any means but definitely didn’t fall into the performance same brackets as the 335D.
Issues I found with it were the specs of the available cars, they are all over the place, with some cars having had the majority of the options list dropped on them to other missing silly things like Bluetooth and satnav. The pricing is also massively variable and doesn’t always reflect the spec of the cars. Had a very bad experience with my local dealer when I’d arranged a test drive which also put me off somewhat, even after trying another dealer it left a bad taste…
BMW 5 F10 Series 530D/535D
Didn’t even drive it, dealers are useless, having tried 3 or 4 locally and my experience since owning the 335D just reinforced my previous thoughts based on my 330D ownership back in 2003-2004. To be honest the styling even on the M Sport has gone very very safe, with it just looking dull. Interior is nice but unless the car has the full electric seats I just can’t get comfortable or into a position where I can see clearly round the B pillar. My wife has also vowed never to own another so that didn’t help matters.
Mercedes E Class Saloon/Coupe
We had a good experience with the local Merc dealer, where they were very helpful and willing to let us try dropping car seats into the demos etc and drove the E350 CDI version of both the saloon and coupe. To drive they were both pretty decent, good gearbox which was well matched to the engine and very smooth. Interior felt a bit hit and miss quality wise, with some of the plastics feeling like they’d not be out of place being used for the kids seats in schools.
The exterior of the saloon, is great until you get to the rear quarter and then its just rubbish and it looks under wheeled (if that makes sense), so we discounted that. Space in the coupe was decent, not as good as the A5, and it looked better than the saloon, but as a package we just didn’t like it that much.
Jaguar XF
Jaguar HO emailed me at the start of this year offering me a drive in the XJ, which they had to twist my arm soooo hard to get me agree to you wouldn’t believe
Turned up at our local dealer and they basically gave us the keys, to a fully spec’d 3.0 DS PL showed us the basics and said come back before we close tonight (we arrived at 10.30…)We ended up going back mid afternoon, as we had to take one of my girls to a party and got talking to the sales person. Explained to him that 52K was a bit out of our price range at the moment, regardless of how much we loved the car, so we got talking about the XF.
We’ve liked the XF from launch and have driven it on a number of occasions but the prices have stayed pretty strong for the 3.0 D or DS with a decent spec so hadn’t really been looking at them that closely for a while. We knew we loved the interior and exterior design and how it drove but they let us drive a car anyway which confirmed which re-enforced what we previously had thought but we decided to go back and test the A5 again just to “make sure”. At that stage we concluded that the XF just was the “right” car for us, if we could find one in the right colour combination and the right spec.
So we sat down with sales guy at the local dealer and went through a few options and the colours etc we’d want on the car and the monthly figure we needed to hit and basically left him to it. He called back at the start of the next week with a car he had in group stock which was pretty close to the spec we wanted so I asked him to run some numbers, but they didn’t get into the right ball park. So he promised to keep looking and come back to me if something came up.
In the meantime we went to a couple of other dealers, all of which treated us in a similar manor, but not as good as the local one, and looked at a few options they had but never got into the right ballpark number wise or just not quite right spec wise. We continued to trawl the jaguar used car site and autotrader and each time we found something which looked right it had been sold or the dealer came back with stupid offers on the BMW making it not viable.
During this time the local dealer phoned us a few times with some options, but never ones which were right, either being not quite the right spec or wrong colour combos, until that is last Thursday…
He managed to find us an ex-Jaguar management car which was the right colour combination and had the perfect spec on it. He gave us a very strong price on the BMW and the monthly number was under budget…
So today we picked up a Jaguar XF 3.0 D S Premium Luxury in Ultimate Black, with Warm Charcoal and Piano Black interior, with the Bowers and Wilkins Stereo, parking pack, blind spot monitors, sports interior pack and aero pack and to say I’m a little bit chuffed would be a HUGEEEEE understatement.
I’ll post some pictures up tomorrow as by the time I got home with it it was dark but on the short journey we’ve had in it so far it feels so much nicer than the BMW and on par if not a little quicker. The Jaguar dealers have grasped the term Customer Service and really taken it to heart, unlike some of the other so called premium brands and I've got nothing but good things to say about the ones near me.
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