New BMW M5 - M3's Daddy....

For twenty years since the first example appeared as a new breed of super-fast premium saloon, BMW have thought of the mighty M5 as their ‘businessman’s express’ – the up-market and practical face of high performance driving. And one of the things that always made the M5 particularly attractive to a certain kind of customer was that, for all its performance, it was relatively understated, and relatively uncomplicated – just plenty of power in a thoroughly developed but straightforward rear-drive chassis wrapped in a muscular, but really quite subtle, body.

Pics can be viewed at my Picasa gallery here.

The new, fourth generation M5 is still, unmistakably, the businessman’s express, but now it has a new edge, and a bit less of the old understatement. Because the new M5 is more aggressive than ever. Having been revealed in what turns out to be very close to production form at the Geneva Show in March this year, as the Concept M5, the real thing goes on sale in most of Europe in January, and in the UK a couple of months later ‘in Spring’, with a projected price of £61,755.

It will be a lot of fast, handsome car for the money, and in some ways a much more complex one than the M5 has ever been before – which is partly good news and partly less good news, depending on how subtly you like your ‘businessman’s express’ performance to be delivered.

Engine: Mind-boggling

In previous generations, the M5 has been powered by the 286bhp straight-six that started life in BMW’s M1 supercar, by a 340bhp evolution of the legendary six, then most recently by a 400bhp 5-litre V8 in the last 5 Series body shape. And now the M5 version of the controversially styled new 5 Series moves the super-saloon the goalposts again, with a 5-litre V10 engine that’s the most powerful BMW have ever put in a road car. Which means, if you push the right buttons, a peak of 507bhp, and 520Nm of torque – which is a full 25 per cent power hike over the last M5.

And this is a stunningly impressive engine. Like BMW’s F1 V10s it has a 90 degree vee-angle and compact dimensions for such a large capacity, so it sits usefully low in the nose for a lower centre of gravity. Like the racing engines it has sophisticated individual electronic control for each of the ten air-gulping throttle ‘butterflies’, for exceptional power and instantaneous responses.

It also has Bi-VANOS variable valve timing, to give the best possible spread of power with the best drivability, and it has the most powerful electronic engine management package so far created for a road car, with three 32-bit processors and the ability to perform more than 200 million individual calculations and instructions per second. All of which makes this a very special engine indeed...

...but you don’t need an engineering qualification to know that, you just have to listen to the new M5 take off in anger and you’ll get the point. Because the other thing the M5 V10 shares with a racing engine is its enthusiasm for high revs – and if that doesn’t means the screaming 19,000 or so of the F1 brigade, it does mean a heady 8250rpm redline which is way beyond the point where most road car engines would already have disintegrated, and BMW don’t hide it with excessive silencing, they let it howl through racing style manifolds and four huge tailpipes.

Multi-mode to suit…

Then they start to add the tricks. For reasons best known to themselves, but presumably to satisfy political sensitivity and the toughest emissions regulations, they give this mighty engine two power modes – a basic 400bhp, and at the simple touch of a button, that headline 507bhp, which is obviously the one that most people will be interested in.
And that’s the one that gives claimed performance figures of 0-62mph (0-100kph) in 4.7 seconds, which isn’t particularly unusual for a top-end super-saloon any more, or 0-124mph (0-200kph) in 15 seconds, which is pretty impressive punch in any company, especially with five seats!

But now we start to hit the complications, because the M5 doesn’t just have one character any more, it has the option, at the touch of a few buttons, of multiple personalities. First of all there’s that choice of power outputs, but what goes with that is also a choice of damper settings to vary the ride comfort and handling balance, a choice of how aggressively the traction and stability controls cut in (and even the option to switch the stability control out altogether when conditions permit), a choice of manual and automatic transmission modes, each with its own range of programmes to vary the shift time and responses, and most extreme of all, a ‘launch control’ function for ultimate take-offs.

Pics can be viewed at my Picasa gallery here.

The gears

The variable damping and stability controls are already reasonably familiar territory, and useful for different driving conditions, even different driver moods, and it’s hard to argue with them. The multi-choice transmission settings are a different matter, and arguably the new M5’s weakest link – or at least it’s least satisfying one.
Because the transmission in question is a new seven-speed version of BMW’s Sequential Manual Gearbox (SMG), which offers automatic shifts but isn’t an automatic and which has the positive action of a clutch but which doesn’t have the irritation of a clutch pedal. So in theory you get all the efficiency advantages of a manual gearbox with all the simple changes of an automatic – the big drawback being that even in this latest development, SMG still lacks one very important thing, refinement.

To put it crudely, the SMG is a bit of a thumper, and unless you make subtle throttle adjustments to help it on its way (which largely defeats the object of ‘automatic’ shifts) you feel and hear every gearchange, up or down, in a way that you’d probably be ashamed of if you were doing it yourself. And with this much power and seven gears it is a real issue. Which is clearly one reason for the next complication – six levels of shift-speed in ‘manual’, touch-shift mode, and five in full automatic mode. And that’s probably nine too many, rather than two that work smoothly.

Stand by for take-off...