In today’s competitive automobile industry, if a manufacturer wants to stay in the competition, they should plan well in advance for the future, and the car’s that they are going to launch. We see all the top automobile manufacturers of the globe doing this. They start designing and testing the cars to be launched, a few years in advance. And it is no different for BMW. We have renderings of the 2017 BMW 5-Series, of which specifications have already started appearing on the internet.
The 2017 BMW 5-Series will be built on an all new platform BMW calls the OKL (Oberklasse), which BMW plans to share across all the variants of the 5, 6 and 7-Series. BMW will shave off over 100 kilos from the current generation model by making use of lightweight materials such as aluminium and carbon fiber wherever possible.
The design of the 2017 BMW 5-Series will be based on the Gran Lusso Coupe Concept, Along with making the car lightweight, more efforts are being put into making the car more efficient, and hence, it will have a drag coefficient of just 0.24 cd. BMW will also make a long wheelbase variant, specifically for the Chinese market.
Along with making it more efficient aerodynamically, BMW will also have to make the car’s engines more efficient and greener, because the emissions norms will be much stricter in 2017. A change in the engines will make this happen, and by change, I mean a whole new family of engines. BMW is considering smaller 3-cylinder engines, which will be equipped with a turbocharger or two, in order to extract the maximum power as well as efficiency from the engines. These 3-cylinder diesel engines are expected to give 60 miles to the gallon which is really good for a car of this size. However, for the more power thirsty consumer, BMW will also have on offer 4-cylinder and 6-cylinder engines. The 3.0 liter, 6-cylinder tri-turbo diesel engine is expected to produce close to 400 BHP!! The 3 cylinder engines will be mated to a 6-speed manual transmission sourced from Getrag, and the bigger engines will come mated to a 9-speed ZF automatic transmission.
BMW plans to launch the 2017 5-Series by the end of 2016 and deliveries will begin in 2017. From the looks of it, we are in for cleaner, greener and meaner cars in the future.
Also see – BMW 5-Series facelift luxury sedan launched in India
Source – Autobild
