BMW M5 (G90) review

Munich is grey and moody as we slip its grasp. This is the time to make sense of the drive modes and the bewildering configurability, and really study the cabin. I’m not at all convinced by BMW’s latest generation interiors. This M5’s dashboard architecture lacks the cohesion of BMW cabins past – it’s almost random, like a tumbled Jenga tower. The twin digital displays that reach two-thirds of the way across the cabin look stark but work really well, but the illuminated strip across the dash with its iceberg effect and changing colours just doesn’t seem appropriate in a car of an M5’s stature.

Present day M-cars all have a level of drive mode adaptability for so many parameters – throttle response, damping, augmented engine sound, brake pedal response, steering weight, driver assist functions and so on – that you really have to familiarise yourself with it all before setting off. Try to do so on the move and you’ll cover miles at a time with your eyes fixed more on the central display than the road ahead. The little M1 and M2 buttons on the steering wheel allow you to save your favourite configurations, but if you want to adjust, say, the damping to suit the very bumpy road you’ve just encountered, you’re left jabbing away at the touchscreen once again.

Moreover, the button you must press to bring up the drive mode menu is somewhere around your elbow, almost out of sight. This M5 with its hybrid system and all the various modes and settings that come with it is more complicated still. Eventually a car maker will build this level of configurability into its cars, but in an intuitive way. Right now, right here, we’re miles off.

On the plus side, the interior is roomy and the seats are large, comfortable yet reasonably supportive. Let your hands wander around the cockpit pressing buttons and stroking surfaces and they’ll find nothing that feels cheap or badly screwed together.

Given the £111,405 asking price, I suppose that’s as well. In town and on the autobahn ride comfort is good and the cabin quiet and serene. As we build speed on the first derestricted section of autobahn, the M5 feels so stable you could forget you’re moving at all. If all you want is a fast, effortless express, this could be the greatest M5 there’s been. Certainly no other has built speed like this – it mightn’t lead the way among M5s for power-to-weight, but with all the torque and response of that hybrid system, it piles on speed like it’s got a rocket wedged up its backside.

Hybrid drive may come at a cost, but it has its advantages too. The snap you feel when you crack open the throttle and the surge that lasts as long as you keep your ankle extended make a strong case for it. And knocking off the petrol engine in the city and slipping through the streets silently and briskly without blowing eight cylinders’ worth of torched hydrocarbons across town is a huge benefit too. But wouldn’t a smaller hybrid system with a lighter battery both save a lot of weight and give you all of those benefits too? I asked M engineering chief Dirk Hacker that very question. The weight saving, he told me, wouldn’t be that great, not least because the battery pack is already baked into the 5 Series hybrid platform.

But the real benefit of that meaningful electric-only range is the tax saving. The M5’s official CO2 figure is below the crucial 50g/km threshold, which means massive savings for company car buyers, and in markets where levies are applied to more polluting cars, private buyers too. In Ireland, this new M5 is cheaper than the M3 by €15,000 because of it.

But 2435kg is still a huge amount of weight to contain. Doing the heavy lifting are four-wheel drive, rear-steer (an M5 first), double wishbones up front and a multilink rear axle behind, coil springs with adaptive dampers all round in place of the 5 Series’ air springs, an electronically controlled Active M Differential at the rear and optional M Carbon Ceramic Brakes with gold calipers. The transmission is the ubiquitous ZF eight-speed automatic, the tyres 20 inches and 285-section at the front and 21 inches and 295-section at the rear, by either Hankook or Michelin. There’s still a function that disengages the front drive shafts, but it disengages the stability control system too. I tried it once on a damp road, frightened myself silly and didn’t bother again.

For only the third time there’s a Touring version too, one Hacker tells me should feel subtly but meaningfully different to the saloon. I’ll let you know if it does early next month, as soon as I’m allowed to write about it.

Eventually we peel off the autobahn and onto more inviting roads that twist and turn through the hills, revealing a great deal more about this new M5. This is what I’ve been waiting for, ever since BMW announced this latest model and put a number to its weight. These roads are smooth – smooth enough to make an Englishman weep – so like everything else, the dampers are switched up into their sportiest setting. I’ve got the sharpest throttle response, the meatiest brake pedal, the fastest gearshifts, the most potent engine sound and the four-wheel drive system in 4WD Sport where it favours the rear axle and trims back the stability control – anything to bring the sports car out of this M5.

Anything but the steering. I’ve got that in a moderate setting because too much weight does it no favours. We’re pressing on now. The way this thing leaps from one corner to the next is breathtaking, the car rushing onwards at full throttle like it weighs half what it really does. The steering is numb, but it’s sharp and accurate and the rate of response is natural, so right away you pick your line through a sequence of turns with confidence. That builds further still as you lean on the grip and feel how hard the tyres bite, how much speed you can carry, and how well controlled the mass is on these smooth and fluent roads.

There is a level of assuredness that comes with a four-wheel drive system like this, with brakes as strong as these and with such towering poise and stability. The M5 is composed and unflustered as you press on along a road like this, and strangely agile too. It seems to shrug off half a tonne or more while you chase it harder and harder still.

The rumbling V8 is still the heart of this car – it hasn’t been somehow neutered or sanitised by the hybrid system, so you wring it out like an M-car engine should be, chasing redlines gear after gear. The eight-speed gearbox is faultless and the brake pedal consistent and easy to read even as it shuffles from regenerative braking to the kind that brings those enormous carbon ceramic discs into play.

I kill the M Sound function out of curiosity and realise instantly how much of the once invigorating soundtrack was being augmented digitally. The V8’s natural sound is actually quite tinny, almost hollow, and that realisation begins the sequence that brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. Or if not the whole house then certainly the entire east wing.

I push harder, trying to find the point where this exercise becomes not just impressive but thrilling. But the road narrows and suddenly the M5 feels enormous, like it’s wandering down a narrow corridor, not blasting across a landscape. In the best performance cars, and the best M5s, the road feels like your playground, not the thing that’s hemming you in. And you feel connected to the car and the surface of the road, sensing the grip beneath you, and you gradually edge up to the car’s limits and hold it there, hanging it ever so slightly over the precipice for mile after mile.

This isn’t that kind of car. For all its grip, control, precision and unexpected agility, it’s just too numb, too remote to really draw you in like that. Maybe it ultimately comes down to sheer size and weight. Perhaps a car like this never could be as engaging as I’d like it to be. But then again, this is just the first new M5 variant – there may be others coming down the pike that’ll be more focused, more fun to drive.

As it stands, the G90 M5 is not the M-car you’d choose to be in when picking apart a hillside road. It serves a different purpose, and if you’re prepared to accept that it’s actually a supremely comfortable, capable and rapid four-door luxury saloon, not anything more athletic than that, it is close to flawless. And in fact, that’s been the case now for at least three generations. Of that bunch, only the spellbinding F90 M5 CS – which we named the greatest M5 of all time just this summer – has been a driver’s car of exceptional standing.

The CS was a car that could only have come from that suburb of Munich called Garching. This one, meanwhile, could just as well have a three-pointed star or four interlocking rings on its nose. What we have here, then, is a brilliantly effective supersaloon, but not yet a great M5.

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