If you wanted a medium sized executive saloon in the late 1990s and you had about £30,000 to spend, there was only one logical answer – the BMW 5-series. While devotees might have pointed with winning smiles toward the Alfa Romeo 166, the Audi A6, the Mercedes-Benz W210 E-class and even our own home grown Rover 75, they all knew that the BMW was the obvious choice and that it was the car against which all of theirs would be judged. And Jaguar knew this too; when developing the S-TYPE it openly admitted that the car it had benchmarked was the Bavarian masterclass on wheels.
BMW in Britain had effectively picked up the centre market where Jaguar had left off in the late 1960s – while rivals Rover and Triumph plugged away with older designs, the Neue Klasse and its successors led BMW to an image of quiet competence and sporting prowess. The cars weren’t cheap, but they were cheaper than a Mercedes and let’s be honest here, status symbols were never made of cars that everybody could attain with ease. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s the 5-series came to be known as the default choice for a young executive making his mark – and when the E39 model came out in 1996 it was widely seen as the best 5-series yet. Even today there are devotees who swear that subsequent BMWs haven’t come close. With a range of six cylinder petrol engines ranging from 2.0 to 3.0 andfold before it was too late.
