BMW M5 (G90) – design
Muscled-up widebody stance has enormous presence, but also takes up a lot of space on the road
In the metal, the G90 looks almost Mercedes S-class big, and with good reason; it’s almost exactly S-class size – 5.1m long, over 1.5m tall and almost 2m wide – in part to accommodate all the hybrid hardware.
It’s a menacing supersaloon too, and not just because of its overall size. The M5’s wheelarches have been widened by 7.5cm at the front and 4.8cm at the rear versus the standard 5-series, for a distinctive M car stance. The sills have been beefed up to join up to the wider arches, but the rear doors don’t flow seamlessly into the swollen quarter panels, which does look a little clumsy.
This is the first time that the front and rear wings have been flared on an M5, and while previous models have been more subtle, the G90 looks strikingly muscular, more like a scaled-up, current (G80) M3 than any previous M5.