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The BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring offers huge performance, all-wheel drive grip, rewarding handling, comfortable ride quality, the practicality of an estate, and of course zero tailpipe emissions.
We’ve already reviewed the BMW i5 eDrive40 M Sport Pro Touring and it was judged to be an excellent car. However if the performance of the i5 eDrive40 model isn’t sufficient, then the answer may be the BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring. The question is, is it worth paying the price premium…?
We think the i5 Touring looks great, and it’s even sportier in M60 form; please note that colours other than the ‘Carbon Black metallic’ of our test car are available. The interior combines the latest technology and a high quality feel – and BMW’s excellent iDrive rotary controller still survives. The M60 xDrive can be identified by the red band encircling the top of the steering wheel.
The whole point of the i5 Touring is to offer practicality, which it does thanks to its boot size of 570 litres – or 1,700 litres if the rear seats are folded down. There’s a small storage compartment under the boot floor, which isn’t big enough to fit the charging cables, so these have to sit in the boot (and there’s no front trunk (‘frunk’) under the bonnet). There’s lots of rear legroom, but so there should be, because at 5,060mm, the i5 Touring is long. This makes it bigger than a standard car parking bay in the UK, which is typically 2.4 metres wide by 4.8 metres long. It also sits low to the ground so watch out for large speed bumps.
The i5 M60 xDrive Touring has an 83.9 kWh battery (with 81.2 kWh usable capacity), and two electric motors delivering 593 hp of power, 795 Nm of torque and all-wheel drive. It has a towing weight of 2,000 kg.
The i5 eDrive40 Touring is an excellent car to drive but the M60 model transforms this driving experience into an electric estate car weighing 2,425 kg that feels like it’s been engineered for a racetrack. However unlike most cars designed for the racetrack, the M60 xDrive still manages to deliver extremely comfortable ride quality – yes, even with the large 20-inch alloy wheels and low profile tyres.
The M60 xDrive feels planted to the road – whether that’s a racetrack, a motorway or country roads. The handling probably can’t be described as agile due to the almost 2.5 tonne weight, but BMW has once again done a great job of achieving both comfortable ride quality and rewarding handling.
It’s the performance that’s most suited to the racetrack – as well as for safely overtaking slow moving vehicles on A and B-roads. A 0-62 mph acceleration time of 3.9 seconds, assisted by a ‘Boost’ paddle on the left of the steering wheel which gives a short burst of maximum torque, is impressive for an electric estate weighing this much.
BMW doesn’t do steering wheel-mounted paddles to adjust the level of brake regeneration, however you can select B mode using the gear selector switch, and you can also choose high, medium or low braking energy recovery in the iDrive menu.
As usual with BMWs, the weighting for controls such as the steering and brakes is excellent, as well as the levels of refinement and overall build quality. You can get a great driving position – which is also low compared to most new cars which are SUVs.
Drivers of many BMWs over recent years will be used to three buttons conveniently positioned near the driver’s left hand on the centre console giving drive modes of Eco, Comfort and Sport – and selectable with just one press of a button. But no longer. You now have a ‘My Modes’ button, which doesn’t give you obvious driving modes, but instead brings up a number of different ‘experiences’ on the centre screen which you need to scroll through, consisting of Personal, Sport, Efficient, Expressive, Relax, Digital Art and Silent. Each comes with a different design on the i5’s wide (14.9-inch) central touchscreen (which replaces the satnav or whatever you had on screen previously) and driver’s display, as well as colour changes in the ‘BMW Interaction Bar’ running around the dashboard and the inside of the doors.
Although you can guess how the driving characteristics will be changed by Sport and Efficient modes, we’re pretty sure most people won’t have a clue about how the other modes will impact on the driving dynamics. Sport, apart from improved responses, delivers Hans Zimmer’s futuristic sporty soundtrack (‘BMW IconicSounds Electric’), and listen out for the simulated noise of Expressive mode, which sounds like two giant pieces of metal grinding together. Because the graphics on the screen don’t automatically return to what they were before, it now takes three presses of buttons to select an experience mode and return to the previous information that you had on the touchscreen.
BMW’s iDrive has been the best infotainment system in cars for many years, due in part to the rotary controller and physical shortcut buttons between the front seats being a better solution than having to reach to press buttons on the touchscreen all the time. This rotary controller and the shortcut buttons have been disappearing on some recent BMWs, but thankfully they’re still there on the i5. Our test car also featured a head-up display as well as the driver’s display and the wide central touchscreen; having information directly in front of the driver is a much better solution than new cars which only have a central touchscreen. And the i5 has simple, clear shortcut buttons at the bottom of the screen for the key controls of Media, Nav, Climate, Home, Apps, Phone and CarPlay – as well as the physical shortcut buttons for Nav, Media and Phone next to the rotary controller. However unlike most previous BMWs, you don’t get separate (ie. user-friendly) climate controls.
A small button in the centre console with the graphic of a car and three lines brings up a screen for driving settings, displaying three boxes, one of which is for driver assistance settings, and this provides an easy way to switch off the speed warning and the lane departure warning, although you need to do this every time you start the car.
Controls such as the gear selector and iDrive rotary controller are available with the ‘crystal glass’ appearance as seen in the BMW iX, and the i5 features in-car gaming with AirConsole, allowing you to play games while charging.
The BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring has an official WLTP combined electric driving range of 300 miles. After a week of mixed driving the real-world range was averaging 280 miles. At one point the car displayed a projected range of 378 miles in ‘Max Range’, but this setting limits certain car functions such as the use of the air conditioning.
The i5 M60 xDrive Touring’s WLTP energy consumption figure is 3-3.4 miles per kWh. It has a maximum ultra-rapid charging rate of 205 kW which enables a 10% to 80% DC charge in 30 minutes, meaning that 97 miles of range can be added in 10 minutes if starting with a charge level of 10%.
The i5 can AC charge at up to 11kW as standard and optionally up to 22kW, with 22kW being standard on the i5 M60 xDrive.
The BMW i5 has a heat pump as standard, which should minimise loss to the battery capacity when using the cabin heating in cold weather. Waste heat generated by the electric motors is used to control the temperature of the battery in the BMW i5 for the first time, and the charging has been optimised to reduce in a curve rather than in steps.
The BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring is priced at £99,090. This includes equipment such as M Sport package Pro and M Sport Brakes with Red Calipers. However in addition, our test car had a long list of options including M Adaptive Suspension Pro (£4,000), Panoramic Glass Sunroof (£1,600), Crafted Clarity Controls (£600), M Carbon Exterior Styling (£920), Technology Plus Pack (£3,300) and Comfort Plus Pack (£3,350). All options totalled £13,770, taking the total price of the car to £113,765. Phew. In comparison, the BMW i5 eDrive40 M Sport Pro Touring that we tested was priced at £78,450.
Prices and specifications correct at time of review
The BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring combines huge performance with zero tailpipe emissions, rewarding handing, comfortable ride quality, lots of space and the latest interior technology. It’s a highly impressive and very desirable EV, but if you’re being rational about it, you need to ask if you need that extra performance so much that it justifies the price hike from £78,450 for the i5 eDrive40 M Sport Pro Touring (which is quite a hefty price tag anyway) to £99,090 for the i5 M60 xDrive Touring – that’s £20,640 extra (or £35,315 extra if you take the options into account!). The fact is that the i5 eDrive40 is a perfectly good car, and it will tick the boxes for most buyers. But if you really, really want that crazy acceleration and the reassuring way that the all-wheel drive system transfers the power to the road, then feel free to splash out £99,090 or, more likely, the equivalent monthly payments. Aside from the price, like the i5 eDrive40, there’s not really much to fault the BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring and it’s awarded a Green Car Guide rating of 10 out of 10.
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