BMW M5 review

Is the BMW M5 a good car?

Absolutely it is. The new seventh generation ‘G90’ BMW M5 is a monstrously fast super-saloon that’s a fair bit more spacious than before and is bristling with new technologies that keep it relevant – and surprisingly clean. Its hybrid V8 powertrain has a range of ability that no previous M5 driver could have dreamed about, with a genuine 40-mile electric range and impressively low emissions (and therefore tax implications) to go with it. And at the press of a button it can be transformed into a tyre-shredding twin-turbo V8 thunder-saloon.

The only real issue is that when that transformation happens, although it unveils a mighty amount of performance, there’s not enough feel or driver satisfaction to go with it. Emotionally, the new M5, clever as it is, feels a bit cold. Its V8 engine lacks aural charisma. Its steering lacks true feel. And on the road it drives more how you’d imagine a BMW M7 might. And while it tries hard to disguise its weight, in the end it still weighs two and a half tonnes. So while this first version is a deeply impressive car, it isn’t quite a great one. We’ll need to wait for the more focused versions that will come in future for that.  

How much does the BMW M5 cost?

The BMW M5 is the quintessential super saloon. Its lineage stretches back to the eighties, and while it’s grown in power (and popularity), it’s also more rounded and usable than ever before. The outgoing model used a familiar V8, rear-wheel drive layout, but the new one – driven here – throws hybrid power into the mix for the first time.

As standard, the M5 starts from just over £110,000, while the all-but mechanically identical Touring costs around £2k more. Although it comes extremely well specified as standard, there are numerous individual options that can be specified – from carbon ceramic brakes with gold callipers to an M Driver’s Package that increases the top speed from 155mph to 189mph. 

There are also two main option packs for the UK – Comfort and Ultimate – the former costing £1,800 on the saloon, £1,600 on the Touring; the latter £19,500 for the saloon and £18,900 on the Touring. The Comfort Pack brings seat ventilation and heating and roller blinds for the side windows. The Ultimate Pack includes all the individual interior options available plus a full carbon visual pack on the outside – including the carbon ceramic brakes – and an Alcantara headlining.

Unlike the M3, the new M5 will not be offered with the Competition Pack – at least not to begin with. In the fullness of time more performance-orientated versions will eventually follow.

This is the seventh-generation M5, the first having been unleashed in the late eighties with less than half the power of this latest M-hybrid model.

26

The new M5 is a deeply complex machine on many levels, and one that takes time to understand and appreciate. It also takes miles to comprehend the sheer range of its abilities, and ultimately to work out if all the technologies gel to create a car that’s any good to drive or not.

The raw numbers would very much suggest it is. The 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 is mated to a 22.1kWh lithium ion battery and a single e-motor, producing a total of 717bhp and 1000Nm. Drive is sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed M Steptronic gearbox in which there are five different drive modes; Hybrid, Electric, eControl, Dynamic and Dynamic Plus. 

At start-up the car is four wheel-drive, yet if you select 2WD within the M Driver menu, your seventh-generation M5 can still be transformed into a tyre-smoking rear-wheel-drive monster if you fancy it – at which point all 717bhp goes directly to the 21-inch rear wheels and you are very much on your own.

How the new M5 drives – and how fast it feels – depends largely upon which drive mode you select. In Electric it glides around like a reasonably calm, decently potent electric car that can hit 87mph before the petrol engine kicks in. Its electric range stands at between 35 and 40 miles depending how hard you drive it.

In Hybrid the car itself works out how much energy to unleash through the driven wheels, depending which dynamic mode you’ve selected for the engine, gearbox, chassis, steering and even the brakes – all these individual elements can be tailored individually within the M driver’s menu, and within each main drive mode. As we said, this is a complex machine that needs time to understand.

Only in Dynamic and Dynamic Plus modes is the powertrain’s full potential available – so all 194bhp of electric power plus 575bhp from the twin-turbo V8 – and although this doesn’t quite add up to a combined 769bhp (the total output is a mere 717bhp) the M5 still feels nutcase fast if you put your foot down and hold it there for a few magical seconds along an autobahn.

The official performance claims are pretty mind-altering for a car that weighs 2,510kg with just a lone driver on board. With launch control it can hit 62mph in 3.5 seconds, and 124mph (200kmh) in a whisker over 10 seconds. All out it’s restricted to 155mph – or 189mph if you’ve specified the M Driver’s Pack.

Either way, the latest M5 is a monstrously fast car in a straight line, with massive throttle response and huge torque available right across its 7,200rpm rev range. The only aspect that doesn’t blow us away is the noise it makes at full chat. Although this can be enhanced digitally, it’s not as good to listen to as any of its predecessors, with a strange lack of aural depth. Ultimately the new M5 sounds a touch clinical, which is a shame.

The same can also be said, though to a lesser extent, of the way it stops, steers and goes round corners. The steering and chassis are both extremely efficient – in any of the numerous drive modes – and the brakes are immense in either of their two pedal-response modes. The ride is also unusually good for an M car, even in Dynamic mode, while grip is well beyond doubt on the public road courtesy of the huge 20 and 21-inch Michelin Pilot Sport 5S tyres front and rear. Dynamically it’s a car that’s very hard to fault – thanks to its combination of four wheel-steering, four wheel-drive, huge tyres and fundamentally well sorted chassis, it sticks to the road like the proverbial you-know-what for most of the time, seemingly no matter how hard you push it.

Yet at no time is there much true feel through the steering or seats, even though turn-in response is excellent, and although grip levels are sky high, the way the M5 telegraphs the way it builds up towards its limit is, on occasions, quite numb. You end up trusting that it will do what they say it can do without there ever being much emotion involved. And that’s almost certainly BMW’s intention with this car. The more involving incarnations will come in the future and will be more engaging, they say, which is fair enough given this is the base version; the one that’s designed to appeal to the widest market, not just rabid enthusiasts.

And that’s the reason it is so supremely refined at motorway speeds, and why dual carriageways and fast A-roads are very much its most natural environments, rather than winding B-roads – on which it is simply too big physically to feel completely at home. Be in no doubt, this is a very different M5 to the ones we’ve come to know and love.

26

Thanks to its hybrid powertrain, the new M5 isn’t just meaner, but also cleaner and far more efficient than any of its predecessors. On the combined cycle it returns a claimed 176.6mpg and emits just 37g/km, which is a massive improvement. Yet in the real world, how much fuel – and electricity – it uses depends very much on where, in which mode and how hard you drive it.

Drive it keenly across a B-road in Dynamic or Dynamic Plus modes and the V8 will still burn through fuel in a predictably horrendous manner; we saw as little as 18mpg in bursts on test. But driven more sedately along more open roads in Hybrid mode and you’ll see as much as 40-45mpg. 

In e-Control mode – in which the powertrain regenerates as much electricity from the brakes and engine as it can – the petrol consumption goes up a touch (compared with Hybrid) but driven in the correct way – on a gentle throttle in a high gear, ideally at a constant speed with regular but mild use of the brakes – the M5 will refill its 22.1kWh battery from almost zero in around 20 minutes, which then negates the need to plug it in and charge manually. You’ll use more fuel in the process, of course.

Plugging in as often as possible makes more sense, then. From an AC charging point, the battery (which won’t accept DC charging by the way) takes 3 hours and 15 minutes to refill via a 7.4kW wallbox, says BMW, this will soon improve to 11kw to reduce the charge time to two hours. You’ll need upgraded home electrics for that, which is less common in the UK than it is in Europe.

The fuel tank is relatively small for a car of this size and weight at just 60 litres, but with average fuel consumption of 33-35mpg (which is what we saw over two days) that still gives a real world range of over 400 miles.

At 37g/km the M5 is classed as a low-emission vehicle, which for the time being will make it far less expensive to run as a company car. Insurance groupings haven’t yet been set but expect it to be the equivalent of 50E and therefore be pricey to insure, despite its impressively green credentials.

The battery has an eight year warranty, although in reality BMW is confident it will last for far longer than this so will replace it if its efficiency drops significantly during that time.

26

In the flesh the new BMW M5 looks low, wide and unmistakeably muscular – you can tell it’s an M car from 100 yards away – but it also looks physically big on the road. Far more so than any previous M5.

Yet the designers have done a fine job of disguising just how big it actually is – because inside it’s something of a Tardis, one that boasts acres of space in all directions, and in all five of its leather-lined seats. Leg and headroom in the rear is almost limousine-like, even with a tall driver sitting up front. 

The cabin is overtly hi-tech in design, with a single wraparound TFT screen for the main instruments and infotainment system, similar to what you get in an i5. Lighting plays a strong role in the look and feel of the interior, and this changes in a variety of ways depending which drive mode you select. In Comfort the lighting is calm, while in Dynamic lots of surfaces turn bright red. In Track the visual distractions are actively reduced, while the instrument display shows less detail but shows more information about revs, tyre temperatures, fluid temperatures and so on.

The main instruments are well designed and clear to read, in all modes, plus there are two M buttons on the steering wheel that can be used to deploy whatever presets you choose for the car’s dynamic characteristics (from powertrain to ESC to brake response and even rear-wheel drive). Yet the way you select the three different display modes – of Normal, Dynamic and Track – is less well resolved because this requires extra finger-work down on the centre console – on what BMW describes as the ‘M-specific control panel’ – where there’s a rash of additional buttons to access yet more menus. 

Using these forces you to look away from the road momentarily because the buttons are partially haptic. Even after two days we didn’t get on with the aspect of the M5, although as an owner you’d inevitably acclimatise over time.

One final feature worth noting is a new ‘boost’ function, which you deploy by holding the left hand gearshift paddle for a couple of seconds. No matter what drive mode you’re in, this gives you full beans from the powertrain for a burst of around 10 seconds – should you wish to pass something pretty damn quick. It can only be specified if you have the ‘M Drive Professional’ option pack fitted, but it’s a fresh piece of tech that will appeal to some M5 drivers more than others.  

Sat-nav, stereo and infotainment

The M5 uses BMW’s latest OS 8.5 for its entire infotainment system, and it’s designed to be operated by touch or voice control. Full smartphone integration is included, be that Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and there’s also a Personal eSIM that links the car to your phone via the My BMW app and to your personal BMW ID via a digital key. This means car settings can all be stored on a driver’s phone. All you do is climb in and the car sets itself up to whatever pre-settings you have stored.

On first acquaintance it takes a while to work out which buttons do what on the centre console. The best way to use the system is via voice control using BMW’s Intelligent Personal Assistant, which essentially does whatever you ask it to – from moving the seat to setting destinations for the navigation system. There’s also a 5G antenna installed in the car, to which up to 10 different devices can be connected at any one time.

There are two screens, one of 12.3 inches that contains the main vehicle information directly in front of the driver, plus another 14.9-inch display in the centre with all other information for elements like navigation, the M Driver’s set up, chassis and powertrain settings, the sound system, climate control and so on. There’s also a comprehensive head-up display as standard.

The sound system itself is by Bowers & Wilkins and has 18 speakers and a 655-watt amplifier to provide a total Surround Sound effect. The quality of sound it produces is extraordinary, plus you can enhance the machinations of the twin-turbo V8 via the speakers if music isn’t your thing. 

26

Despite its hybrid powertrain, the M5 has a well-shaped 466-litre boot that can swallow four decent size suitcases and plenty of other smaller bags no problem at all. Its battery and fuel tank have been extremely well packaged within what is a sizeable overall footprint. The car measures 5,096mm long, 1,970mm wide and 1,510mm tall. 

As such, the M5 gives off a major amount of road presence, especially with the carbon option pack fitted. But this is also a supremely comfortable and practical mega-saloon to travel in, far more so than any previous M5. On longer journeys it’s as luxuriant – and comfortable – as any car BMW makes, be that from behind the wheel or any of the other four seats.

The rear backrests can be split 40:20:40 and fold to allow much longer items to be stored partially within the cabin. The boot lid is electric and works hands free via the key. Both M5s (saloon and Touring) are available with an optional tow bar, with the maximum trailer load being 2,000kg. There’s also the option of a trailer coupling that retracts electrically.

26

The M5 doesn’t yet have a Euro NCAP rating, but given the level of safety features it contains, it is hard to see how it could score anything other than very well indeed. 

It is clever enough to be able to be parked, driverless, via the my BMW app from 200 metres away. This would not be possible were it not in possession of myriad cameras and sensors that monitor its movements – and therefore help protect its occupants or anyone who comes anywhere near it from the outside – to ultimately prevent it from coming into contact with anything, or anyone. With or without a driver on board.

All the usual ADAS systems are in place – lane, parking and reverse assistance, plus pedestrian avoidance from all sides. The Michelin Pilot Sport 5S tyres are not run flats so you are still at the mercy of a puncture, but an early warning system should give you as much notice as possible if a tyre starts to deflate.

All parts are warrantied without a limitation on mileage for the first three years, while the lithium-ion battery within the hybrid system is warrantied for a further five years (making eight in total) again without any mileage stipulations. If the battery’s efficiency rating drops significantly during those eight years BMW will still replace it FOC, although they engineers say they are confident the battery will last way, way longer in reality.  

BMW M5 alternatives

There are just two versions of the M5 available – saloon and Touring – and they sit at the very top of the brand’s M-car range. Eventually they will be joined by more focused, and inevitably more expensive versions that wear badges like Competition and CS, but for the foreseeable future, what you see is what you get.

As such, there aren’t many true rivals for the M5 beyond the more predictable ones from Germany; those being the similarly-priced but less potent Audi RS 6, the Porsche Panamera GTS and the Mercedes-AMG E 53.

Go for a full EV and you might want to consider the Lotus Emeya or a Lucid Air as alternatives. But sadly there’s no longer a British rival for the M5, unless the Bentley Continental GT or Flying Spur count – and neither of those are electric yet. 

The Italian Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio and Maserati Ghibli and Quattroporte aren’t quite in the same league technically, dynamically or ecologically.