BMW M5 (G90) – ride and Handling

The M5 feels like a big car straight away, its widened hips filling narrow lanes, ​but you soon discover that it responds with a crisp, clean accuracy that’s unexpected for such a substantial car. The first time you steer into a turn you unconsciously build in a bit of a margin, assuming, based on your knowledge of its mass and its size, that it will take a moment to respond. Only it doesn’t. It steers cleanly and quickly, changing tack with an alacrity that seems to defy physics. 

This translates on track, too. When we drove a prototype M5 at the Salzburgring it felt remarkably agile, in part due to BMW M’s first deployment of active rear-steering. This counter-steers the rear wheels for agility at low speed and parallel steers them at higher speeds for stability. It can almost feel too eager; arriving hard on the brakes and tipping it into tight corners, the way it rotates so keenly can take you by surprise. It’s also generously tyred, with 285/40 ZR20s on the front and barely smaller than the 295/35 ZR21s at the rear, with our test car fitted with Michelin’s PS S 5 tyre. 

On the road in a straight line, waggle the wheel and you can feel that brightness of response but drive normally with measured inputs and the M5 tacks cleanly and precisely into turns. It feels like M engineers have given the car all the agility it should ever need but for everyday road driving has created a zone of calm around the steering’s centre, a place where you can work in a relaxed way. It feels wieldy with well-judged efforts, lovely linearity and a decent sense of what the front is doing, which is mostly going exactly where it’s pointed. There’s no understeer until you go hunting for it, getting on the throttle sooner and sooner in tight corners until finally the front Michelins squeal a little wide. 

The steering is one of three key things that make this a much easier M5 to drive briskly than you might expect, the other two being superbly judged braking and excellent damping. The  brake pedal gives reassuring response from the top of its travel without over-delivering, so the car never feels like it’s running away from you, and when you press harder it has superb feel in its mid travel so you can easily modulate the pressure to get the exactly level of retardation you want. This was with the optional carbon-ceramic brakes costing £8850, which seems like a good investment. 

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The damping plays its part too. All is calm on typically neat and smooth German roads, though an abrupt lateral ridge or sunken pothole breaks through the veneer of softness with a steely firmness that offers an insight into how much control there is keeping the mass in check. Find some properly gnarly asphalt and there’s a bit of jiggle but the suspension manages to round off the lumps and bumps. 

The good thing is that in its base settings, with everything in ‘Comfort’, the car’s dynamic composure feels unshakeable. There are many modes, of course, many tuneable features so you can adjust the car to your taste, ramp things up, though on the road there isn’t much need for tighter damping. Shifting steering up to Sport increases the efforts but is perhaps less linear, while the Sport setting for brake feel was more useful, giving a stronger top-of-the-pedal response. Set the powertrain to Sport or Sport Plus and you get everything the V8 and electric motor can give, all the time, and the kick in the back is noticeably more savage. 

Just how well judged the base settings are is revealed when you switch the drivetrain to the more dynamic MDM. This sends more drive to the rear and on other 4wd M models is the setting of choice for setting lap times, giving an adjustable but effective dynamic balance. On the road in the M5, you can feel the shift, the rear squirming as you accelerate hard out of turns, while in the wet it’s all a bit snappy. Two-wheel drive? A challenge, for sure. 

As ever, you can go ‘a la carte’ and select a profile for the M1 and M2 buttons but there’s also an M Drive button on the centre console and a new ‘boost’ feature: pull back and hold the left-hand paddle for a few seconds and you get a short-cut to maximum standing start performance, the head-up display announcing BOOST in capital letters, just so you know, with a count down before the feature drops out. 

So, what about sound? Unfortunately, although it has a traditional offset crank V8, the latest M5 sounds remarkably like a flat-plane crank V8, despite the effect of piped-in character via the sound system. 

With EV mode and a rounded low-speed ride, the new M5 is relaxing in town. However, in some ways the extension in the other direction, beyond comfort, is illusory. The new M5 is at its best as a road car in mostly comfort settings, offering control and precision and pace that defies its mass. It doesn’t need tighter damping or sharper steering. On track with everything cranked up, its agility and composure are impressive but we can’t ever imagine wanting to track such a huge car. It’s a remarkable car, the new M5, almost able to defy physics, but we admire it more than desire it.