Actually....... (archive)

The 3 & 5 are both classified as compact cars so do not expect too much. The fact is, your run of the mill Toyota, Honda, or Nissan have more back seat room (check out carpoint.com). Several persons who have been in the back seat of my 540 have brought up the lack of space back there and I concur. There is barely enough room to squeeze a calf in between and I routinely move up the seat if someone needs to go back there (I am 6').
The rule of thumb I have read is if you will use the back seat, get a 7. I decided to test the back seat room of the E46 328, 540, 740i, and 750iL for myself. I first moved the front seat to a comfortable position. To my surprise, the back seats of the first 3 all felt equally tight. The differences are like splitting hairs; a half inch or inch of space did not do enough to effect comfort in my opinion (eg: how much can you tell the difference in speed between a 33MHz 486 and 40MHz 486? -- a bit, but they are both slow so it does not matter). The 740iL/750iL does have what I would consider a spacious back seat. There is good legroom which makes it the only comfortable back seat of the group.
As far as the front seat goes, my opinion is there really is not much difference between all BMWs. They seem to be designed to wrap around average size persons. If I use the airline scale of economy, business, and first class then BMW seating has the tightness in seat size and legroom of economy class (ever notice how small the "tube" is where your legs go in BMWs? not even shoulder width). However, they are very adjustable which makes a huge difference. The comfort seats are awesome and can be dialed into a perfect fit.

I am 5 feet 10 inches tall and my weight fluctuates by 10 pounds between 180 and 190 and I am perfectly comfortable in the front and back seats in the 5 Series. As I have said several times before, I fiddled around with the front seat adjustments of my uncles 2000 540i. If the front seats are moved about 2/3 of the way back I would easily have enough room in the front to easily be comfortable on long distance treks. After I fiddled around with the front seats. Then, I got out of the car and got into the back seat. I had enough foot and toe space underneath the front seats and I had enough leg, knee, shoulder, hip room and a lot of headroom (even with the standard moonroof) to easily be comfortable back there on long distance treks. I guess I am very used to sitting in cars that are considerably less spacious than a Lincoln Town Car or Cadillac DeVille. A lot of cars classified as a midsize by the EPA (such as the Lexus GS) actually have the same amount of space inside as the BMW 5 Series (which is classified as a compact by the EPA). The Lexus ES (a midsize according to the EPA) is actually a little less spacious inside than the 5er. Statistics about a vehicles interior and trunk volume are frequently inaccurate.

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