All-wheel-drive version of long-running exec estate arrives in EV form
Why we’re running it: To see if the definitive executive car – a BMW 5 Series – is now electric, albeit in £100k-plus M60 xDrive guise
Month 1 – Specs
Life with a BMW i5 Touring: Month 1
Welcoming the i5 Touring to the fleet
Before this BMW i5 Touring arrived, I’d spent some time looking after a Land Rover Defender. The two are about the same price, at approximately £100,000 – and, no, I don’t know how so many people appear able to afford cars of that value either.
But to run them as company cars would be quite the different experience. The Defender came with a 3.0-litre diesel engine, thus attracting a 37% benefit-in-kind tax rating – so an employee would pay tax on nearly £37,000 annually; a 40% taxpayer would be faced with a monthly tax bill of nearly £1200.
Compare and contrast with this new BMW i5 Touring and its 2% benefit-in-kind rating, which would leave a 40% taxpayer with a bill of just £67 a month to run it.
The difference is of the magnitude that I keep going back to check it’s not wrong. It’s no wonder that EVs or long-electric-range plug-in hybrids are today the go-to cars for company users.
Anyway, a near-six-figure purchase price before options gets one into a significant amount of electrified BMW hardware. The 5 Series Touring is a big estate car these days, at 5060mm long and 1900mm wide across the body, and it has a 2995mm wheelbase. There’s lots of shared 7 Series architecture underneath it.
This is as plush as 5s get, arriving with us as it did in M60 xDrive form. It’s four-wheel drive courtesy of two motors and has 592bhp in total, so it can go from 0-62mph in a claimed 3.9sec. It’s a figure I can entirely believe: I recommend a cup with a fully closable lid for one’s morning-commute tea.
Like less oomphy 5s this one comes with an 81.2kWh battery, which, owing to the car’s stonking performance and 2425kg weight, means it won’t go quite so far as lower-powered single-motor 5s on a charge: its combined WLTP range is 310 miles and energy consumption is 3.3mpkWh. It can charge up at 205kW. Although, in my early experience, you won’t be surprised to learn, it won’t routinely match all of those figures.
It does come pretty well equipped as standard, and there are 10 colours to choose from, nine of them metallic, including a red, a blue and a green as well as obligatory monochromes, before you would have to spend a bean for something else. This one is the £1095 Tanzanite blue.
The M60 comes with an M Sport Pro package too, most significantly including uprated brakes, with the rest of it cosmetic. Other standard equipment includes Bowers & Wilkins audio, and I suspect one would be pretty content with it.
To this example, though, a few packages have been added. M Adaptive Suspension Pro costs £4000 and comes with adjustable damping. The Technology Plus pack (£3300) has a head-up display plus parking and driving assistant functions that I must spend more time getting used to, including whatever ‘BMW Natural Interaction’ is.
Then there’s a Comfort Plus pack, a £3350 combination of heated rear as well as front seats, ventilated front seats and, one of my favourite things on cooler mornings, a heated steering wheel.
That brings the total on-the-road cost of this car to £116,060, but if you didn’t spec all of that, I don’t think you’d feel like you’d missed out: the lush upholstery, silvery interior highlights and 20in wheels all come as standard.
Throw in the broad colour range too, and, well, it turns out that a £100k car isn’t exactly poverty spec, unsurprisingly.
Some of our testers say they prefer the lesser i5s to this all-singing, all-dancing* (*may not sing or dance) top-spec M60 model, owing to their lighter weight and what to them feels like a more compliant ride. I can understand that, and although I haven’t spent much time in various 5s, when I drove a couple of i7s I came away from them feeling the same way.
But I have very quickly got into the i5 M60’s groove, and it doesn’t feel like it’s short-changing me on comfort.
At some point I’d like to try a back-to-back test with an M40, but still, while it’s for very clear reasons not as absorbent as the Defender I rolled around in before, the BMW casts surface imperfections aside well enough, plus it comes with the advantage of a much smaller frontal area and a considerably lower centre of gravity, making it a much more dynamic road car.
The steering is smooth and accurate and medium-heavy of weight, and while this is still a big car with a hefty kerb weight, it disguises both pretty well.
I’m finding it a little easier to park than the Land Rover owing to the reduced size and active-rear steering, but with smaller mirrors it’s not necessarily easier to place in a bay – it’s just simpler to find one in which it fits (although if, like me, you prefer to park in an end bay, scooched as far away from other cars – and their drivers – as is possible, you’ll know there’s still often some searching to it).
Since the nippers have left home I’m not using all of the car’s practicality as much as I used to, but I have had some rear-seat passengers who tell me it’s pretty nice back there: it’s always a treat for them to find rear seat heating, I find.
The boot is big, too, and let down only by the fact that the 5 doesn’t get a separately opening glass hatch these days. I’d give up a few of the other options to have retained that, but it’s one of few early gripes with this car, which is otherwise settling into the Autocar fleet very nicely.
Second Opinion
The BMW i5 is big, wide and heavy: a recipe for driving hell. Yet this electric exec is so nimble and breezy to use. This is BMW at its best, with a package that is so refined and complete it would sway even the sternest of EV doubters to switch. I’ll be pinching the keys off you, MP. WR
Will Rimell
BMW i5 Touring specification
Specs: Price New £99,995 Price as tested £116,060 Options £116,060 Options M Adaptive Suspension Pro £4000, Comfort Plus pack £3350,Technology Plus pack £3300, sunroof £1600, towbar £1200, Tanzanite blue paint £1095, carbon exterior styling £920, clarity controls £600
Test Data: Engine 2x permanent magnet synchronous motors, 81.2kWh battery Power 592bhp Torque 586lb ft Kerb weight 2425kg Top speed 143mph 0-62mph 3.9sec Fuel economy 3.3mpkWh (claimed) CO2 0g/km Faults None Expenses None
