BMW M5 long-term review

It’s a car, see, that has been put into more articles and videos than any other long-term test car in recent memory. We picked it up in north Wales, after a quick stint on track at Anglesey, and immediately threw it into a group test (which it won), then drove it to MIRA, where it went through our gruelling road test mill.

That’s where we recorded the aforementioned 0-60mph time, as well as being impressed as it sailed past 100mph in 7.5sec, through a standing quarter-mile in 11.5sec and a standing kilometre in 20.8sec. It lapped our dry handling circuit, in damp conditions, in 1min 14.5sec, which is about the same time as we once put a Lamborghini Murciélago around it in the dry.

Since then it has been straight-line tested for video against several rivals including a 600bhp Seat Arosa diesel (on our YouTube channel and well worth a look), and twin-tested for video and words against an Alpina B5.

Some of our testers preferred the B5’s easygoing way of doing things over the M5’s rather more sporting gait, and there are plenty of occasions when I’d feel the same. But hey, if you’re going to lose a twin test, it might as well be against a car that’s all but the same, right?

The M5 has done all of this while keeping intact what I’d consider to be its more important role: that of executive car –a role the 5 Series does so well that our sister magazine, What Car?, now considers the BMW to be its luxury car of choice.

I’d stop short of considering the M5 a luxury car, not because it’s insufficiently lavish – that’s not the case, even without the options that raise this one’s base price of £88,000 by almost £14,000 – but because it rides with more control than luxuriance. It remains, however refined, quiet and comfortable and makes a great executive car.

That said, there are things to consider on a car with this level of oomph. Specify carbon-ceramic brakes (£7495) and you’ll need to give them an occasional workout to stop them from screeching like they’ve got gravel stuck in them. A few hard stops tends to do it, I found. And if you engage two-wheel drive too often and over-exert the rear tyres, then, well, you’ll remember this is a 553lb ft car and the cost for a pair of replacements will be north of £400.

When I rashly wore through the M5’s rears, I phoned my local tyre warehouse, who reckoned they could get a pair of 285/35 ZR 20 Pirelli P Zeros by that afternoon. Which sounded a bit suspicious: BMW and Pirelli make a bit of a thing about the tyres being bespoke to the M5. So I phoned my preferred tyre fitter (ever since they managed to source a tyre for our Kia Stinger within an hour on a Saturday morning), Bob’s Tyres of Stevenage, who said sure, you can get the right size P Zero quickly, but they’re not necessarily the right tyres. McLaren, among others, use the same size as BMW.

M5-specific ones – BMW fitment has a star on the sidewall, which sits on the rim differently – had to be ordered direct from Pirelli. That took a couple of days, but at least I was sure I was getting the right rubber. Anyway, drive more sensibly and, like our front tyres, you’ll have no problem even over 15,000 miles.

We had no other issues. In the US, M5s have been recalled to update software that can stop the fuel pump working, as has happened to one UK car I know of. There’s no British DVSA recall, but BMW’s UK head office took the car back about halfway through our loan to check it over and carry out a software update. No hardware was changed. So if you’ve got an early M5 and that update hasn’t been done by a dealer, it’s worth chasing.

The only other time the BMW needed to be stopped was when fuelling it which, at around 23mpg, was once every 350 miles or so. But drive sedately, settle on motorways a lot as I quite often do, and you can coax 28mpg out of it, along with 375 miles from a tank of fuel.

Which is pretty darned good for a 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8, even if you’re not asking a lot of it, and well into genuine executive car territory. It is a reminder that there are very few cars which can do both things with quite the same purpose as the M5.

Second Opinion

I’m sad that we’re already saying farewell to the M5. What an impressive, multi-talented bit of kit it is: a comfortable cruiser and an engaging B-road weapon all rolled into one. That’s not to say it’s without fault — its ride is a touch jiggly at lower speeds, for instance — but for the most part it’s sehr, sehr gut. It’ll also do 0-60mph in 3.3 seconds – in the wet.

Simon Davis

Love it:

PRACTICALITY The M5’s 550-litre boot is supplemented by the fact that the rear seats split and fold.

BRAKES Carbon-ceramic discs and pads show no wear and retain brilliant stopping power.

DRIVING POSITION Massively adjustable seats mean that the memory pre-set function is extremely handy.

Loathe it:

IMPRACTICALLY HUGE KEY It’s a smart key, so can tell me stuff such as how much fuel is in the car – but I’ll know that when I get in.

CAR’S WIDTH This 5 Series is extremely wide. Parking cameras, which show door openings, are very handy.

Final mileage: 14,982

Back to the top

Time for some new rubber - 15th August 2018

Good intel from my favourite tyre place: valves like this look cooler than rubber ones but tend to corrode themselves to the rim after a couple of years, making replacement difficult. Anyway, our M5 has a new pair of Pirelli P Zeros on its rear rims, owing to the fact that although it’s four-wheel drive, a rear-drive mode is available.

Mileage: 12,375

Back to the top

Transporting an entire Autocar back catalogue - 15th July 2018

Imagine a pile of magazines at shoulder height. Then multiply that by nine. That’s how many copies of Autocar you can fit in a BMW M5, using all of the boot, the rear seats, front passenger seat and respective footwells. I’m guessing it’s half a tonne, maybe more. But the suspension, albeit heavily compressed, coped admirably.

Mileage: 12,124

Back to the top

Never mind Alonso & Co in a Toyota: our M5 came away from Le Mans as a winner - 4th July 2018

The M5 has been back to BMW, at the request of the people there. Just want to give it a onceover, they said, and update some software.

Usually, we prefer to go to dealers for the full ownership experience but, well, they asked. And it’s their car, after all. Kindly, they repaired a windscreen stonechip, and replaced the two wheel centres we think had been nicked, and gave the rest of the car a once-over.

Wouldn’t usually, lads, but y’know: it’s a 600bhp super-saloon so we thought we’d just make sure things were fine. Which they were, and the next day the M5 was taken straight down to Le Mans, in the hands of my PistonHeads colleagues. (I can’t believe they actually put a sticker on it, but there you go. It’s a thing. It has come off cleanly enough.)

What’s good about it, though, is that it’s useful to get another set of hands and feet into the car, to give a second opinion. Knowing Le Mans, I know what the trip will have been like: supercars and sports cars everywhere, but although our PH correspondent asks “is the M5 too subtle?”, it apparently still garnered quite a lot of attention on the PH campsite, despite a Ford GT being parked next to it.

Quite rightly. I reckon that if you’ve got a Ford GT (or equivalent), you’re probably in the market for something like an M5 as a daily driver too. Which is a job it performs well.

“Brakes are fantastic”, although it’s “hard to measure out the throttle properly when pulling away”, which are both accurate. It has developed, though, a “screech under braking from the front right at slow speeds in stop-start traffic”, which I’d just begun to notice too.

There’s plenty of pad all round on the £7495 carbon-ceramic brakes, which are usually slightly less refined than iron rotors, but not this much. There’s nothing obvious, so I’ll stick the front corner on a stand and take a wheel off, to check the inside of the disc to see if a stone or bit of grit is stuck in there.

The good thing about second opinions, though, is that they don’t always agree with the first ones. PH is less impressed by the interior than I am; not that keen on the trim around the door handle or that the forward centre console lid is sometimes rattly, which I hadn’t noticed. I’ve had a play and think I’ve worked out why. It’s possible to unseat the lid from its runners very easily, but you can either push it back on or, if you close the lid, it re-seats it anyway.

Where we do agree is that it sounds “a little tame from the inside” (true), and it’s annoying that the electrics and stereo don’t turn off when you turn the ignition off (also true, even after you open the door and shut it behind you. Apparently, the latest X2 remedies this). And we all like the way it drives.

I have a bit of a beef with how wide the M5 feels, both parking it and down narrow lanes, but in France “you can still place it nicely on narrow roads”. It’s also “very comfortable for the whole journey” and “road noise is minimal even on the worst bits of the M25” but that there’s “noticeable tramlining on UK roads after being on the smooth roads of France”.

These last bits are the interesting ones. The UK has particularly poorly surfaced roads, which is why a lot of car companies come to sign off vehicle dynamics here, but how a car behaves still tells you a lot about where it was developed, and who it’s meant for.

The M5 is really very good in the UK and copes with our potholed, heavily crowned and narrow roads pretty well. But it’s even more brilliant elsewhere.

Love it:

ENTERING ADDRESSES So many different ways to input an address to the nav: say it, scroll the knob, use the knob as an input pad or tap it out on screen.

Loathe it:

HAND SIGNALS If you make flamboyant hand gestures, there’s every chance you’ll change the media volume, which has a motion sensor.

Mileage: 11,583

Back to the top

Life with a BMW M5: Month 2

The mystery of the missing roundels - 27th June 2018

I don’t know how or when or why it happened, but the BMW roundels on the centre of our M5’s front wheels vanished. I thought somebody had changed the wheels while the car was out on a test, or they’d fallen off, but apparently not: is nicking roundels a thing? Anyway, BMW kindly replaced them: they cost £15 each from a dealer.

Mileage: 8990

Back to the top

The humble car key doesn't get more useful, or complex, than this - 13th June 2018

The M5’s key can do all kinds of things from inside your house that it would be just as sensible to do from an app on your phone. Such is the array that, inevitably, it needs charging, but so little do I use the extras that I don’t tend to realise until it has been as flat as a bean for who knows how long. It still locks and unlocks and starts the car, though.

Mileage: 8778

Back to the top

A 900-mile return trip to the M3 CS launch and N24 race? Be rude not to take the M5 - 30th May 2018

Among the blinding greenery of the Rhineland, there’s an isolated ribbon of Tarmac that flows between the sleepy spa town of Bad Neuenahr and the altogether less somnolent village of Nürburg.

It’s well surfaced for the most part and the setting is completely bucolic. Ideal, say, for an E300 cab: stick the dampers in Comfort, Bob Seger on the radio. Not a worry in the world.

The funny thing is that above a certain level of commitment, this same stretch becomes an utterly brutal examination of a car’s dynamic repertoire. There are second-, third- and even fourth-gear corners of capricious profile and camber changes where you wouldn’t expect.

One sequence isn’t unlike the infamous Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, for pity’s sake, and there’s a bend whose exit is not only blind but also concurrent with an unfavourable surface change and a vicious compression on the nearside. You’re spat out of it at the top of third gear.

It was mainly along this marvellous stretch that the new BMW M3 CS made a convincing case for itself as the most engaging device in M division’s current portfolio. But it was a close-run thing.

Why? Because our M5 long-term test car could also be found in that precise neck of the Adenauer Forest during the same weekend of the Nürburgring 24 Hours.

For outright zip, ultimately it failed to match a car some 400kg lighter and with a significantly lower centre of gravity, and nor was it quite so confidence inspiring when the Armco loomed. But it was arguably the greater feat of engineering purely for its astounding body control and the fact that it was actually enjoyable to punt along a road that could have been bespoke-laid for a Lotus Exige.

As you may have surmised, our long-termer was the steed between home and a gruelling race weekend during which BMW launched its latest M-badged road car, and therein lies the true appeal of this M5. Some back-road fun sandwiched by substantial highway blasts resulted in around 900 miles and an overall fuel economy of 21.4 mpg, for a total expenditure of roughly £260.

No, this 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 was never going to set records for frugality but, if the car impresses on more tortuous routes, it’ll blow your mind on a derestricted autobahn. How fast? An indicated (and restricted) 164mph, at which point your estimated time of arrival goes into free fall with that engine still pulling damnably hard.

Perhaps of greater significance is that proceedings remain serene enough that you’d barely have to raise your voice to be heard by those in the back. More prosaically, the M5 simply makes things easy on this kind of trip.

You can angle the headlights for Continental duties at the touch of a button and the head-up display converts your speed and speed-limit icons into km/h. It is comfortable, it is spacious, the Harman Kardon sound system is very good and you don’t worry about leaving the thing in a strange corner of an unfamiliar town after a mammoth day in the saddle.

It is quite stocky, though, with a track width that’s more or less equal to that of a Lamborghini Huracán Performante. It means there’s now a small nick on one of the alloy wheels, inflicted by the ghastly width restrictors on the top deck on the Eurotunnel trains.

Every time I’m lucky enough to drive this car, three things occur to me. The seats are set too high, the body control is simply a touch close for everyday driving, even for a super-saloon, and, God, how I wish they’d made a bit more of the wheel arches.

But while it takes me a little time to get onto the M5’s wavelength, once there I’m pretty much smitten.

Richard Lane

Love it:

CRUISE MISSILE No surprise that a 600bhp saloon with massage seats can seemingly condense international travel, but it’s a lovely sensation all the same.

Loathe it:

TOURING RANGE ‘Loathe’ is strong, but if the 70-litre fuel tank was just a little bigger, you’d easily manage 450 miles between cruising fill-ups.

Mileage: 9130

Back to the top

Life with a BMW M5: Month 1

Best seat in the house - 9th May 2018

The steering column, seat back (lower and upper), under-thigh support, head restraint, plus the usual seat options – forward, back, up, down – all adjust electrically. There’s so much adjustment that I have resorted to using the memory function. Then there’s heating, cooling and massage too. I’ll bet the seat weighs more than I do.

Mileage: 3360

Back to the top

Welcoming the M5 to our fleet – 2 May 2018

I can’t remember a car that has been busier on its arrival on the Autocar long-term test fleet than the new BMW M5. With decent reason, I suppose; it’s a new M5. They are rare and we want to see, as quickly as possible, just how good they are.

From the moment it was collected from north Wales, the M5 was being used in a group test alongside a Mercedes-AMG E63 S and a Cadillac CTS-V. It won. Then it was videoed alongside an E63 with two different testers — me included. It won again. (Albeit with a lot of love for the AMG, I’ll be honest.)

Since then, we’ve videoed it alongside an Alpina B5, photographed it alongside the B5 for a feature and, just two weeks ago on these pages, it was subjected to a full Autocar road test. Four and a half stars, my lovely. Four minor demerits; otherwise spot on.

Some of the highlights, then? The 592bhp four-wheel-drive 4.4-litre V8 saloon hits 60mph from rest in 3.3sec. Then there’s the 7.5sec it takes to reach 100mph, a standing quarter mile in 11.5sec at 125.1mph and a standing kilometre in 20.8sec at 159.1mph.

So even over a standing kilometre, the M5 is no more than seven-tenths behind a Ferrari 458 Speciale. It’s that fast.

Comfortable, too — for the most part. Our road test noted a slightly jittery ride on occasion and, mostly, I’m inclined to agree. If terrific body control is the trade-off, though, and presumably there has to be some kind of compromise in a 1940kg car that has to be an executive saloon and yet is also trying to be a sport car with supercar power, then I suppose that’s the rub.

What I can tell you is that I can’t think of another car that, when it comes to trying to be both engaging and sporty, and yet also luxurious and comfy, is so complete in its dynamic make-up.

Inside, it’s everything a 5 Series is as well. It’ll seat five in great comfort, there's a 530-litre boot behind them, with a can of foam beneath the boot floor in case you get a puncture because the M5 doesn’t have run-flat tyres.

Which is one reason why, I suspect, the M5 has such a bewildering array of dynamic capabilities and why the Alpina B5 (spoiler alert) doesn’t ride night and day better — something that's usually one of Alpina’s great traits.

You can slacken the M5’s suspension, plus its other attributes — powertrain, gearbox, steering weight — to a bewildering degree, too. On the centre console by the gearlever — on which there are three modes for upshift timing — you can select which damper modes, engine response, transmission response and steering weight you want.

Or you can select from pre-programmed variants. Or you can pick your own set-up and programme that into two discrete red levers on the steering wheel. That’s what I’ve done.

On the left lever is full comfort on everything. On the right is full angry on everything, stability control disengaged and a transmission that’s in rear-wheel drive mode. Sometimes I flit between these and select other things, as I get used to the car. But mostly I realise I’m doing it for experience and novelty. Were the M5 mine, I suspect I’d just rely on those two particular set-ups.

There are lots of other things to get used to and get your head around, too, in part thanks to a raft of options that include one of my other favourite steering wheel buttons: a heated wheel rim. I do like a heated steering wheel. And, the other day, somebody left a pea under 20 mattresses and 20 feather-beds and I could still feel it at night!

Anyway, that’s part of the Comfort pack, which our road test reckoned was a good idea to spec, unlike the Premium pack. I agree; the M5 has a carbonfibre roof to reduce weight and make it lower, so I’d steer clear of too many options — such as the Premium pack’s soft-close doors — that add the kilos back on again.

Carbon-ceramic brakes also made the list, at £7495, and an M Sports exhaust, at £1100. The brake package is probably what provides a slightly oversensitive pedal at times — we’ll see if that improves with miles — and the ’zorst adds a welcome edge to the turbocharged motor, which otherwise resorts to relatively convincing speaker augmentation for some of its excitement.

Aural excitement, anyway. It relies on deploying 592bhp in great unhurried strides to deliver the visceral excitement. The engine is terrific. Less overtly V8ish than an AMG it may be, but there’s no arguing with the amount of oomph it provides or how it delivers it through the eight-speed automatic 'box.

It’s even capable, if you’re careful, of 28mpg, although 23mpg is more likely and 7.5mpg is possible on a track. I suppose owners don’t take M5s there that often, although they should, because it’s a great way to find out that BMW’s new super-saloon is unsurpassed in its dynamic abilities.

I’m looking forward to exploring those more as we find many, many more jobs for the M5 to do.

Second opinion

I love this car. I struggled at first to see why a 5 Series needed to be so hardcore but, after 400 miles, I just couldn’t get enough of its near-supercar steering and body control, plus its intoxicating acceleration, given the practical package and effortless delivery. Brilliant!

Steve Cropley

Back to the top

BMW M5 prices and specification

Prices: List price new £87,940 List price now £89,705 Price as tested £101,900 Dealer value now £91,000 Private value now £89,000 Trade value now £87,000 (part exchange)

Options:Premium Package (including soft-close doors, massage seats, ceramic finish for controls) £1995, Comfort Package (including steering wheel heating, seat heating all-round) £1195, M Sports exhaust £1100, carbonfibre engine cover £1025, carbon-ceramic brakes £7495, M seat belts £260, carbonfibre/aluminium-look trim £495, Apple CarPlay £235, online entertainment £160