Yahoo Autos The 2025 BMW M5 Is Both Heavy and Healthy
Last year, the American Medical Association urged doctors to put less stock in Body Mass Index figures, claiming the traditional method of dividing weight by height squared doesn’t give a reliable picture of overall health. Which segues neatly into the 2025 BMW M5, a car that has been fat-shamed all over the internet but moves like a body-positive yoga influencer.
The latest M5 costs $120,675 and weighs a gargantuan 5390 pounds, according to BMW, or about 1000 pounds more than the old $119,495 M5 Competition sedan. Go for the new M5 Touring, which returns to Europe after a 14-year sabbatical and makes its first ever appearance in North America, and the needle on the scale edges up to 5530 pounds. That's SUV territory.
It's not only the flared fenders — the rear ones making their M5 debut — or the 0.9 inches of additional wheelbase versus the last-generation car that are primarily responsible for the additional heft. The real villain is the hot sedan's first hybrid system. M engineers skipped the 48-volt mild-hybrid tech already in play on M-lite models like the X7 M60i and went for a full plug-in-hybrid package.
An 18.6-kWh battery, of which 14.8 kWh is usable, lives under the M5's rear floor and feeds a single electric motor crammed inside the eight-speed ZF automatic transmission. This generates 194 hp and 207 lb-ft, boosted to 332 lb-ft by pre-stage gearing — the kind of muscle that enables an automaker to drop a couple cylinders and still make performance gains.
BMW M's biggest rival, Mercedes-AMG, is reportedly set to do exactly that in the new E63 sedan due next year, downsizing from a V-8 to an inline-six; the formerly V-8-powered C63 has already lost half its pistons and a similar percentage of its former character. But the BMW M5 goes PHEV and keeps its V-8, a combination that delivers peaks of 717 hp and 738 lb-ft of torque, up from 617 hp and 553 lb-ft for the old M5 Competition.
The 4.4-liter S68 doesn't sound much like a V-8, though. The noise is flat and a little edgy, not rich and expensive-sounding, a result of M fitting a crossover pipe in the exhaust designed to give the motor improved response and a soundtrack like, we're told, a supercar with a flat-plane-crank V-8.
Despite that, acceleration off the line is less than supercar-like. The official 3.4-second 0-to-60-mph time, though quick by the standards of regular cars, puts the 2025 model a disappointing 0.2 seconds behind the old M5 Competition and 0.4 seconds down on the M5 CS, the quickest version of the previous generation. But leaning into the right pedal on a highway or an empty country road, as there was plenty of opportunity to do on the Spanish launch route, confirmed that hybrid power makes for even more crushing passing performance.
Pressing the accelerator is enough to to shrink any stretch of asphalt like you're watching a POV movie of the journey edited by jump-cut pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. But for the real fireworks, pull and hold the left-hand shift paddle, the one marked Boost. That action primes the entire powertrain to deliver the maximum available hit of controlled energy the moment you mat the throttle.
Two buttons on the steering wheel, marked M1 and M2 (and familiar from other M cars), allow a more personalized style of madness. And you'll want to spend a few minutes configuring them with your favorite combinations of settings, because, while you can adjust each on the fly, the menu is vast. You almost need someone riding shotgun to act like as co-driver to do the mode switching while you keep your eyes on the road and yelling "Sport Brake!" or "Comfort Steering!"
M5s have always had a dual character, an ability to loaf along like a luxury car but with the option to switch things up when the road gets interesting. This one has an even broader spread of abilities. Its default comfort-biased setup delivers a smooth ride on all but the most broken surfaces and still does a good job of controlling the sedan's middle-aged spread. But the big surprise is just how well the M5 disguises its weight when you crank up the pace.
Like Hyundai's 4861-pound Ioniq 5 N, the M5 uses its strong front-end grip, quick steering, and firm roll control to trick its driver into thinking there was a typo in the weight column on the spec sheet. Even an unexpected steering correction (mea culpa, I overcooked things coming into a blind crest) or jumping on the middle pedal at the end of a long straight — the sort of situations that ought to bring the weight sharply back into focus — don't faze it.
Rear-axle steering and a variable ratio rack, plus $8500 of optional carbon brakes and the latest Michelin Pilot Sport S 5 rubber, help make those feats possible. What sounds like a case of tech overload delivers a surprisingly natural-feeling handling balance on the road and none of the understeer we experienced when driving a prototype on track at the Salzburgring earlier this year.
The M5 is quick to respond but never nervous, and I soon felt comfortable enough to switch to the more rear-biased 4WD Sport mode. As before, it is still possible to configure the transmission to send zero torque to the front wheels—but there's no need to on the road when the Sport mode is this fast, this fun.
There is something, though, that will make the new M5's driver think twice before really letting it rip, and it's not the weight. Rather, it's the width. Those muscular front and rear fenders cover track measurements that are 3.0 inches and 1.9 inches broader than on the regular 5-series, which causes the 77.6-inch-wide M5 to feel a little too snug within its lane on the sort of narrow, twisty roads that an M2 or M4 would devour — even with the higher grip and traction levels of the new car compared to its predecessor.
Faster, wider roads and even faster, wider autobahns are the M5's more natural domain, places where the M5 would feel comfortable eating hundreds of miles at huge average speeds. Stock examples are limited to 155 mph, but throwing in an extra $2500 for the M Driver's package raises the restriction to 190 mph, a feature many American buyers might feel is as irrelevant to their M5 experience as they have the ability to creep around armed with nothing more than 194 hp of electric power. The EV mode is rated at 42 miles of range in the European cycle, meaning you'll get at least 20 miles in real use, and an 87-mph top speed allows it to cover most driving situations. But acceleration is modest: M-type excitement, nonexistent.
In countries where cars are priced according to their CO2 output, the new M5 costs less than the M3, but hybrid assistance brings fewer benefits in the U.S. It doesn't qualify the M5 for tax credits or help you duck out of the gas guzzler tax, even though it should cost less to fuel. But it does make for a car that's heavier than it ought to be.
If that doesn’t sound like progress, try this angle. Without hybrid power, the M5 might have struggled to get a green light from the BMW board at all. And given the choice between no M5 and one that feels even more explosive, more luxurious, looks meaner and handles better than that curb weight says it has any right to, this feels like an acceptable compromise.
You Might Also Like
