Do you want your dog, shopping, luggage and family to be able to experience fighter-jet-like acceleration at the drop of a hat? Well, then you need the new BMW i5 Touring M60... The whole concept of a fast estate is one that allows car enthusiasts to complete their potential dream garage with just one vehicle - performance car and family hauler in one compelling package. Does the new i5 Touring M60 nail the brief?
In the metal
As with the saloon version of the BMW i5, this M60 model seems to have been designed to answer the posed question: “Can I have a practical, family-friendly, electric car with the power and acceleration of a McLaren F1?” The answer being an emphatic yes.
On the outside, there are only a few visual cues to tell you that this is a car with utterly crushing performance. The grille is the main giveaway, losing the chrome trim of the standard eDrive40 model and gaining instead a blanked-off affair with a couple of inset nostrils. That grille is also lit up at night by a surrounding strip of LED lights, a feature which I must admit is growing on me. To be honest, that’s about it on the outside. For such a potent machine, the M60 is subtle about it, which to be frank is all part of the appeal.
Inside, the cabin is barely any different either, but when your cabin is this good, why bother changing it? The sports seats are a touch deeper and more welcoming, and the seatbelts have the M three-colour signature, but the rest is as per the regular i5 Touring and that’s fine, as it’s a wonderful interior. OK, so the crystal-style light bar that runs across the dashboard is a bit naff, and the menu on that big 14.5-inch touchscreen can be fiddly at times, but in general this is a hugely successful cabin, and one that feels beautifully well-made too.
The back seats are also welcoming and roomy, thanks to a wheelbase that’s just 5mm short of the full 3.0 metres. The floor is a touch high, thanks to the battery being mounted underneath, but it’s not excessively so, and your rear-seat passengers should be able to get comfortable.
The boot, at 570 litres, is well-sized, with no loading lip, and you can easily flip the back seats flat to open 1,700 litres of room. Plus, there’s underfloor storage for charging cables and the luggage blind. It’s a shame that the old 5 Series Touring USP of opening rear tailgate glass has been excised.
Driving it
To get the ultimate performance from the M60, you need to either have Sport mode selected, or you need to tug the little ‘Boost’ lever behind the steering wheel, which opens up maximum power and torque for ten seconds (and which also activates a space-age whooshing noise in place of an engine note, which is actually kind of annoying).
Up to that point, the i5 Touring M60 has been providing 517hp and 780Nm of torque - hardly ‘un-senior figures’ - but now you have access to the full 601hp and 820Nm. And boy does the M60 deploy those to the full. Standing start acceleration is savage enough to drain the blood from your toes, and it really doesn’t tail off much. A quick sprint on a handy Autobahn showed us that the M60 keeps pressing you hard back in your seat until well past 200km/h...
The 3.8-second 0-100km/h time can, in fairness, be matched by some much cheaper cars these days (the Volvo EX30, for example) but the combo of that staggering acceleration and the i5 Touring’s hefty size (it’s five metres long and nearly 2,500kg at the kerb in this M60 form) give it a very particular feel.
Mind you, you won’t access all that grunt all that much, not least because it can be positively vomit inducing. Any passengers will need to be warned what you’re about to do, and have their heads pressed firmly back into the seats before socks are applied to carpet. Some kind of F-104 spec G-suit might be appropriate, to prevent all the blood rushing out of your head. And don’t leave lids off and hot drinks.
The thing is, it’s all a bit unnecessary. Even with the driving mode set to Efficient, the M60 accelerates as fast as you could want any car to do so, certainly on the public road. Still, BMW needs those headline-grabbing 0-100km/h times for ‘showroom appeal’ or something.
As for efficiency, the M60 isn’t all that bad, although it does have some limitations. On our mixed driving route, we averaged just under 22kWh/100km, which is decent for something this big and this powerful and that included the fast, but brief, blast up the Autobahn. That suggests a one-charge range of around 360km. The i5 Touring does seem to have an Achilles heel and that’s steady motorway cruising. It just can’t seem to hold onto charge at that point, and so your useable range falls to around 300km. Which is OK if you’re in a country replete with fast-charging opportunities (and the i5 Touring M60 will charge at up to 205kW on DC power, or up to 22kW on AC) but not so great in an Irish context.
While it’s true that cheap Chinese stuff can match the i5 M60 for sheer acceleration (the €42,995 MG4 XPower will keep up with it as far as 100km/h), when you get to a proper bit of road, the BMW quickly reminds you why the company coined ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ as a catchphrase, and also starts to justify the extra €80,000 you’ll have to spend...
Now, any car weighing near enough 2,500kg is going to find that no matter how deftly it dodges the laws of physics, at some point that law is going to catch up with it, handcuffs at the ready. For the i5 M60, that point is in long, slow corners where the heft (and the extra nose weight compared to the eDrive40 model) means it can feel as if the front of the car is taking ages to find its way down to some sort of apex. Combined with the fact that the steering is slightly numb - albeit with lovely weight and speed - this means that the M60 is definitely not a true-blue M-car; it’s just not agile enough).
However, find a road with slightly wider-radius corners, and the M60 taps into that muscle-car ancestry and starts to seriously entertain. Is it a little bit point-and-squirt? Yes, but the squirting is really quite something, so the pointing becomes more endurable. It does help that the M60 comes as standard with the Adaptive Chassis Professional system, which constantly adjusts damping stiffness as you drive. There’s also an active steering rack, which tries to give you the right speed and responsiveness for the given situation.
Where the i5 Touring M60 really impresses is when you need to access its dual personality. Dial down the red mist and lean onto the softness, and you’ll be astonished at just how refined, comfortable and soft over bumps this fast estate can be. In that respect, it follows in the best traditions of fast BMWs before it.
What you get for your money
With a price tag of €123,553 - excluding options - the i5 M60 Touring is as expensive as the M5 used to be. Then again, everything’s gotten more expensive, and you couldn’t run an M5 for buttons (if you do most of your charging at home and have a good night-rate deal, you can do that with the M60). Equally, the M5 was only fitfully available as an estate, and until the new M5 arrives, this M60 Touring is the fastest way you can carry your stuff around and keep a BMW badge on the nose. Standard equipment includes 20-inch alloy wheels, the adaptive suspension, synthetic leather upholstery, M Sport brakes, blacked-out exterior trim, four-zone air conditioning, parking assistance and adaptive LED headlights.
Summary
No-one needs an estate car that can accelerate with the savagery of this i5 M60Touring, but to be honest that’s what makes it so darned appealing. It’s a muscle car that’s settled down, had the kids, but still wants to rip the occasional quarter-mile drag. It’s flawed in some ways (the range could be better, the weight is worrying) but we’re finding this a hard car not to fall in love with.
