BMW Info Required

All of them.

HTH.

you will want a touring estate then............. lots around........ Dave

Although if you're only going to do 220miles a week it'd going to take you many years to pay the premium for the diesel model.

Current BMW 318 with the Valvetronic engine is excellent on fuel. Won't find one for 6k. In fact you'll be hard pushed to find a recent and decent BMW diseasel for 6 grand.

If it's mainly motorway, you'll find the fuel consumption between the diesel and petrol not that big. Older BMW diesels were more about power than the very best fuel consumption.

You should be able to find a very decent E34 525 touring for 6k, and that even in auto form will give in the upper 30s on a motorway in petrol guise. Diesels will be more of a problem to find, and correspondingly more expensive.

The manual 520 touring I have does a weekly round trip of 200 miles (180 of which are motorway, the rest A road.) I can't get this to do better than about 28mpg and that's when I try to drive sympathetically influenced by the 'mpg meter'.

I find it hard to believe that the 525 would be 10mpg better.

It's a very comfortable car but fuel economy is not its strong point.

I have an E34 manual 525i saloon with the M50 engine. The best I've achieved is 35 mpg cruising at around 65/70mph long haul on the motorway and using only a very light touch on the throttle. At more normal (cough) motorway speeds then I get a consistent 33 mpg. Mixed driving drops that to 30 mpg. Note though, that this car does not do trips of under 8-10 miles, I use the wife's Nissan for those.

My E34 525 auto - an early 24 valve - regularly managed 37 mpg on long runs (checked full tank to full tank) while sticking within reason to the speed limit, ie up to 80 or so. Exactly as the handbook figure for 75mph. It's quite possible the smaller engine is less economical at cruise due to lower gearing. The 525 auto had a particularly tall 5th.

However, my previous E28 520 manual would also better 30 mpg on a long run, and the 24 valve engines are more efficient.

Of course with both the overall average was nothing like this, as I do a lot of town driving too.

I think it rarely is with small sixes.

I'd say that agrees with my experience of the car. Although the auto had a taller 5th gear and TC lockup so would achieve slightly better motorway figures than the manual at cruise.

My current 528 auto does 32-33 on a long run when keeping up with the traffic. ;-) But you can push that over 35 mpg with care. If only it would better 15mpg in London rush hour. ;-)