It’s a measure of a car’s quality when you have to resort to nit picking to find any faults.

So it is with the excellent BMW 5 Series and, more specifically, the 520d we have on long term test.

Like its predecessors, the 5 Series is undoubtedly a class leader, offering fleets safety, low CO2 emissions, strong residuals, competitive running costs and driver appeal in equal measure.

Styling upgrades to the latest 5 bring it much closer to the 7 Series.

Many drivers will applaud the move towards a more rounded, shapely look; I think it looks a little anodyne compared to the design flourishes of the older model.

Ample room in the back and a cavernous boot offer practicality while the 2.0-litre diesel engine delivers strong driving performance combined with CO2 emissions of just 129g/km for our manual version.

Official fuel figures of 57.6mpg can be achieved with a feather right foot, although our car has more regularly been delivering in the high 40s.

So to those niggles. The dashboard is quite intrusively on the passenger side, leaning inwards which, according to a Fleet News photographer, makes it a little claustrophobic.

The 5 Series has the same annoying sat-nav deficiency as the Audi A4 Avant I recently vacated, accepting only four-digit destination postcodes.

One other issue, which might be down to my IT ineptitude, is that the radio doesn’t appear to automatically find the strongest signal. It results in several manual re-tunes on longer journeys.

But, as I said, nit-picking. And none of these minor complaints affect issues concerning fleet management.

The first few weeks with the 5 Series have flown by, in much the same way as the miles when undertaking long journeys.

The car has already become a favourite on fleet lists – it’s not difficult to see why.