German Car Zone

The silver strip on tail lights from E60 are supposed to be continued in F10 in a evolutionary way.

i suppose you mean the silver strips at the edge of the white indicator lights? but it was also said that they might dump white indicators in favour of the recent full-red clusters..

Ok. I may have read somewhere about silver strip indicators. The white indicator part still lights-up red in LCI E60. The Celis stripd ala F01 are getting wider.

here's my rendering... hopefully we're getting closer to the actual car with this one.




please excuse the lack of windshield wiper but I tried to get as much detail as I can down to the park distance sensors and the number of kidney slats haha.

full post here: JON SIBAL - 2011 BMW 5 Series (F10) rendering

Thanks to everyone for all the valuable info.

Another Jon's great rendering. Source.

Scott,

any truth to this Autocar - Next BMW 5-series will be all steel ?

The headlights reminds more of the passat cc.

I thought with efficient dynamic era, weigh saving was more crucial than ever, hope they are wrong.

That molded steel+alu frame was doomed from the beginning. It brought some weight savings, but the structural rigidity was questionable eg. especially after hit. After being crashed the car's frame was very difficult & extremely costly to repair.

There will be more alu, composite plastics, magnesium etc parts used in F10 (incl. chassis & body), while the body frame is steel only.

BUT ... some special techniques are used by processing the steel - a multi phase steel (tubes are made of thinner steel layers reinforced with some other composites - making them lighter yet stronger than classic steel tubes) so the weight is quite reduced compared to a classic steel frame. E70 , E71, F01 are also using such steel body frame. In the end the F10 body frame is approx. as heavy as E60 body frame. Yet much more rigid (better torsional stiffness; safer at collisions).

In the end reinforced thin steel tube is much stronger and almost as light as all-alu tube. And much cheaper raw material & production.

An all alu body frame in this segment would still be too costly for BMW.




But as said: there will be many other body & chassis parts made of alu (and also other materials like magnesium, composite plastics etc).

Don't worry ... F10 won't be a weight monster.

Great , now they are getting heavier. Great news!