was your X5 "born" on a Monday or Friday?
 

Having been around shops, mechanics, factory-mechs, factory-trainers, and reps over 50+ years of being involved in the love and lore of cars, there's been many instances where the subject of "lower build quality on Monday or Friday" has come up. Some scoff at it, but some others have verified it, from personal experience with odd instances of sloppiness, total indifference, or even practical-joking/sabotage being encountered.

I thought to look up a 2001 calendar, to see what day my X5 was "born"...it was on Friday, the 13th (oh-oh!). Possibly a bad omen, but my X5 has made it 20 years, so maybe not. At least it wasn't on a Monday, which is worse.

I found this forum: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q...-lower-quality, and saw that Sweden has a word for "defective products/cars made on a Monday" (måndagsexemplar)...I think that if the Swedes have a word for the phenomenon, then it truly exists. But, would a German car company (one known for precision) acknowledge it? I think not.

German cars (and various other products: i.e. the Tiger tanks of WW2, for example), are over-complicated and failure-prone for that reason, and even X5's have their failures (though I'm a newbie in X5-land, I've worked on other German..and Swedish...cars that needed nearly-impossible repairs that could've been avoided with simpler engineering). And, though American cars were simpler back in the day, they've been over-complicated, over-engineered, in much the same way nowadays. If there's a gremlin of "bad production days" mixed-in, then failure is assured, at some point.

Though my Friday-the-13th-born X5 hasn't had a "coke bottle been found hanging inside a door panel" (a true occurrence on one or more Detroit assembly lines; though the worst I've actually seen was a few shop rags inside a "new" door), perhaps something else hasn't surfaced yet.

The White Witch must have been created on hump day as she never gives me any trouble when parked and only weekly (seems like sometimes) when she's moving....[emoji28][emoji15]

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Dang - just re-checked my production date: -

Manufacturer BMW AG
Production Plant Spartanburg, USA
Production Date 2005-02-21 (Monday)

But my E53 has been (and still is!) great - best car I've ever owned (as long as I keep up on the maint!). ;)

Where is the build date? Mine has an April '06 build date.

You need to use a VIN decoder, such as https://bimmer.work/

I saved mine as a PDF.... :D

THANKS! I've been looking for a site to decode the VIN. BMW decoding didn't work on my regular sites. April 27, 2006 - Thursday! What day did the last one roll off the assembly line?

Exactly same phrase in Finnish "maanantaikappale" (maanantai=monday, kappale=piece).

at ~160k miles and over 18 years, the only part of my E53 that's here when it was born is the damn shell. And that thing was made weeks prior. Everything else has been replaced a couple times over on any day from Saturday to late on a Sunday or whatever days it was that the 3 transmissions were shipped up one side of the country to another.

What day was my homologated E53 'born'? A day that ended in 'y'.

My VIN decoder says mine was built on June 28, 2001. Thursday!!! :bmw:

But the VIN plate in the driver's door jamb says July 2001.

Any opinions on how accurate either of those are?

the dutch have the same word... whether that makes it a fact is up for debate.