BMW M5 Touring prototype review

The M5 Touring returns after 14 years with a tub-thumping V8 PHEV drivetrain - and we've had an early first taste

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Dirk Hacker, vice-president and head of R&D at BMW’s M division, says he loves the winding mountain roads of North Wales, but the customs regulations his team has had to negotiate in order to get their cars here… not so much.

Autocar road testers have spent decades convincing industry people like Hacker to bring their prototypes to the UK, in order to better tune them for the kinds of dynamic challenges their cars will face here. Now, post-Brexit, it seems we might just as well have been inviting them to Antarctica, such are the practical hurdles to overcome.

However, when there’s a car like the Touring version of the forthcoming BMW M5 in the final stages of development, and an event like the Goodwood Festival of Speed to make a cameo appearance at, it seems they can still be convinced. So here we are, one Tuesday in early July, in the new G99-generation estate version of BMW’s newly plug-in-hybridised performance exec, with some decidedly wet, tight, bumpy and slippery North Walian ‘input’ to provide.

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DESIGN & STYLING

bmw m5 touring front corner2

We reported track-only driving impressions of the M5 saloon a couple of months ago, but if you missed them, we’ll recap by covering off some crucial departures and key differences that this M5 represents - compared with M5s of old, and key rivals.

This is the first car of its line to adopt electrification. There’s now a 195bhp electric motor upstream of the car’s eight-speed automatic transmission, which itself has a two-speed transmission of its own. It’s what the industry calls a P2-style hybrid powertrain (where both electric and petrol powerplants drive through a common transmission) and it's different from the kind currently being used in Mercedes-AMG’s E Performance PHEVs (a P3, in which the main electric drive motor joins downstream of the gearbox).

The M5 Touring will be the only 5 Series estate without self-levelling air suspension at the rear, which means that the 18mpg, 150mph caravanning you had in mind is probably best put on ice.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

“If we’d have gone the same way as them, we’d have had some packaging problems. This way, we can have a bigger battery [22.1kWh gross capacity] that we can take performance from for longer. Running as fast as it can go, our car can do two full laps of the Nordschleife before the battery goes flat. You also needn't accept a downsized engine here in trade-off for your electrification," Hacker explains, with a twinkle in his eye that suggests he knows the deficiencies of his key competitors very well indeed.

So enters the world’s first 700-horsepower M5. This car also has four-wheel steering, which no M5 before it has used. 

And just how much weight has all that added? The figure’s a little under 450kg when you compare F90-gen to G90-gen saloon, like for like, but only about half of that comes from the drive battery and electric motor. “Our base car was already bigger and heavier than the old 5 Series, but with this one, our key challenge was to do enough strengthening of the chassis to support all the weight, and brace against the forces,” Hacker says.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

bmw m5 touring front tracking2 0

The sodden A- and B-roads of Snowdonia aren’t ideal for really exercising such a powerful, large car as this. It feels wide, because it is (more than 70mm wider than the standard-series G90-gen 5 Series across the front axle) but it’s surprisingly dextrous-riding, supple and composed over complex surfaces, and feels fully grown up in the linearity and intuitive precision with which it steers from corner to corner.

Could this be a more chilled-out, longer-legged M5 than the last one, something of a return to the dynamic recipe of, say, the famous E39 ’bahnstormer? 

“We are not blind to the failings of our own cars,” Hacker says. “With the old F10 M5 Competition, we probably went a little too far with the aggressiveness of the execution, and some of our customers told us that. This time, we simply had to remember that the M5 is not a track car. It’s a working vehicle - a tool for business and everyday life, in some cases - and suitability to fast road use is what matters most for it.”

That was the reason, Dirk says, they opted for progressive-rate coils for the car’s suspension. M division doesn’t use air springs, which bring high-frequency friction problems, but knew that a sufficiently firm coil spring would leave a car as heavy as the M5 short on wheel travel. As it is, the M5’s progressive-rate coils deliver 100mm of travel for the suspension. That allows it to be surprisingly supple-riding over bumps, gives the car’s dampers room to work, and also keeps the wheels on the ground when the body is deflected upwards.

Snowdonia has some of the most testing roads this tester knows for vertical body control. The M5 Touring just deals with them, and only feels heavy in those telltale split seconds when its weight is shifting over its rear axle. The super-accessible muscle of its electrically boosted acceleration makes it pick up pace without so much as a dropped ratio. And the assurance of its traction and grip level, and carefully metered accuracy of its steering and body control, make its size and bulk seem less problematic than you might think, although neither disappears entirely.

VERDICT

bmw m5 touring static

Would it be fair to observe that the M5 has grown up, as well as outwards, with this seventh-generation model? Better, perhaps, to say that it's aiming for the kind of dynamic compromise that its forebears of several model generations ago were content with: to be high-speed autobahn bruisers with especially precise, assured distance-covering capabilities, rather than full-sized imitators of the most agile performance saloons on the market, with every technological base covered and then some.

“As we see it,” Hacker says, “having a big super-GT-style M car like this just makes sense. Lots of owners of the current M3 see the footprint and dynamic character that older M5s once had in their cars. The M2 gives us something current, but smaller, more agile and more youthful than M3 and M4. This new M5 gives us something fresh, but larger, more versatile - and maybe a little more mature.”

A fuller verdict on a production-specification car will come later in 2024. But for now, and within the space of three years, it seems that BMW’s in-house tuner has not only replaced its core models but also book-ended them – and, on this evidence, it has probably done so more cleverly than ever before.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.