2025 BMW M5: So Fast You Won’t Have Time to Have Fun

If you drop almost 150 grand to buy a hot car, you’re entitled to ask what you’re getting for your money. What exactly is the deliverable? Is it speed alone, or can you also demand some emotion, some drama, some spine-tingling va-va-voom? The new 717-hp BMW M5 has us thinking, because while it is surely all ate up with speed, and it can do things no 5350-pound car ought to in a universe governed by Newtonian physics, it is something of an ersatz experience. We all know the old axiom that it’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. With the M5—as well as a few AMGs, Audi RSes, and other modern heavy-breathing battle droids—have we reached a point where it’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car fast?

Speed alone can be incredibly dull. We routinely go over 500 mph in airliners and put the shades down, whereas a slow drift in a hot-air balloon makes lifetime memories. There’s no denying that the new hybrid, all-wheel-drive M5 ravages a highway with the best of ‘em. We’re talking zero-to-60 in about three seconds, triple-digit speeds after just a brief toe-dip, and enough g generated in turns to make your head feel like a ship’s anchor. And yet, at times, we found ourselves reaching for the shades.

Juiced by a $3100 carbon exterior package, the car certainly looks the part, with flaring nostrils and fenders, quad pipes jutting from the bumper, and deeply bolstered leather buckets in contrasting leather and with carbon-fiber accents. And for many buyers, that will be enough, thank you. They don’t need drama, they don’t want steering wheels that dance in the hands or wooly lift-throttle oversteer or bawling, unfiltered exhaust notes or any question at all as to whether they will make it through the next corner without pretzeling against a tree.

Specs: 2025 BMW M5

Price: $123,275/$141,225 (base/as-tested)
Powertrain: 4.4-liter V-8 with twin turbochargers and synchronous AC electric motor; 8-speed automatic transmission
Output: 717 horsepower (engine and motor combined); 738 pound-feet of torque
Layout: Front-engine, four-door, five-passenger, all-wheel-drive sedan
Weight: 5350 pounds
0–60 mph: 3.0 seconds as tested
EPA-rated fuel economy: 12/17/14 mpg (city/hwy/combined)
Competitors: Audi RS6 Avant, Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing, Tesla Model S Plaid

Others, however, may find the M5’s style of speed a bit cold. Those who have tried parabolic skis know the feeling; the equipment does all the work for you. Simply mash the pedal and yank the wheel in the desired direction and the computers running the hybrid-electric all-wheel drive, the suspension, the differential, and the stability control figure out how to deliver, all while piping in simulated engine roar through the sound system. Likely you’ll run out of courage before the M5 runs out of capability. You may run out of interest, too; nothing is as boring as invulnerability. The M5 does not make you work for it, and as with anything just handed to you, the value of the result is less.

The new G90 M5 is a stretch from the previous generation—literally—gaining significant inches in both length and width and, most depressingly, another 1000 pounds in weight. There’s so much hardware stuffed in this capsule, from the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8 to the eight-speed automatic with its incorporated 194-hp electric motor to the 14.8-kWh battery that provides up to 25 miles of EV driving to the xDrive all-wheel-drive system with four-wheel steering—that you wonder how they also fit a 15.9-gallon fuel tank, seating for five, and a decent 16.5-cubic foot trunk that expands with the rear seats folded down. The answer: The car is really big, nearly 17 feet long and six-and-a-half feet wide. It’s not hyperbole to call the forthcoming wagon version, the M5 Touring, a low-flying SUV.

Contemporary touch-capacitive “buttons” and high-res screens are the main motif inside, with a color band of light encircling the cockpit that flashes different hues. When you get in, the M tri-color of two blues and an orange goes racing around the interior as a sort of starter’s flag. In our car, painted Isle of Man Green, this color band then defaulted to an electric green that, with the screens, combines to give a Shanghai-by-night feeling. Pushing the start button doesn’t start the engine, but it does boot up the car while the sound system plays deep cinematic chords as if the trailer for an action movie is about to start. “In a world…”

It’s all part of the M5’s incessant theater, which seems to be de rigueur these days in this type of vehicle. At least the M5 doesn’t do artificial backfires. We only wish BMW had given the driver more choices for gauges. What you get is a straightforward central information screen bracketed by two vertical bar graphs that depict speed and revs. It’s all very spacey and video-gamey but it doesn’t come across as particularly swanky. Isn’t there a reason high-fashion watches are mostly analog and round? Circular gauges are both easy to read and timelessly classy. With an OLED screen that can literally display anything you program it to, you’d think BMW would (as Ford does with the much cheaper Mustang) give you the option of paging up a few options for your gauges. Instead, it seems to cater to a world where everyone wears black Apple watches.

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One of the screens lets you configure eight car functions to your mood, from the drivetrain to the brakes to the regen to the steering feel. Comfort, Sport, or, for some functions, the ultra-spicy Sport Plus. You can even lock out the front axle and make the M5 rear-drive only (if you first turn off stability control). Since the car always defaults back to full comfort/safety mode on startup, and working the rotary control to page through the settings is no fun, be sure to save two of these configurations for the M1 and M2 buttons on the steering wheel. That way, each time you get in, you only have to push one of those buttons to configure the car to your taste, rather than go through all eight settings again. People who don’t like to push buttons shouldn’t buy an M5. As the owner of an older E90-generation M3 observed while looking over our new M5, “Isn’t that why I bought an M car, because I wanted it to be in ‘Sport’ all the time?”

The workings of the powertrain are a bit of a mystery. Sometimes the engine runs, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not uncommon to look down in the heat of a backroad flog to see the tach has fallen to zero, the engine has checked out and let the electric motor do the driving. Either way, the sound system merrily makes artificial rumbly noises so when the engine checks back in, there’s only a slight vibration and uptick in rumble to announce it.

Thanks to all those features with fancy names—M TwinPower Turbo, M Hybrid, M Steptronic, M xDrive, Adaptive M Suspension, Active M Differential—the M5 is hugely flexible. It’ll serenely eat the miles of a superslab while you relax in the enveloping seats and soak up your tunes, or it’ll be your size-XL corner killer, hounding Corvettes and Porsches to distraction despite being nearly 50 percent heavier. Some might grouse that the steering is insulated. It is, but it’s also quick and the weighting progresses naturally as you turn off center (again, you can tune it with the settings). You just don’t feel it twitch and sag as you might in an older-school M car. Hankook Ventus Evo Z tires are a bit of a surprise; the M Motorsport division has filled its holes with top-spec Michelins or Pirellis for years. But we couldn’t find fault with the grip nor with the braking supplied by the optional $8500 carbon ceramic discs, at least not on any public road.

The feel and the sounds might all be a simulation—the seats vibrate hilariously under full throttle acceleration, as if you’re in one of those full immersion theaters at Disneyland. But as that guy in The Matrix says just after downing a hunk of steak, “Ignorance is bliss.” Translation: It’s a pretty good simulation.

Plenty of today’s drivers are perfectly happy with a black box on wheels that does exactly what they want, when they want it, with button-push efficiency (speaking of which, the M5 averaged mid-20s mpg during a hearty caning—also impressive). This is the way of today’s world and knocking the M5 for being a bit anodyne is like punching at waves. After all, the M5 has long been the executive express next to the race-boy M3/M4, so you’d expect it with all those buttons to be more, ahem, buttoned-down.

2025 BMW M5

Highs: Will run down Porsches no problem. Stuffed with the latest tech. Supremely flexible.

Lows: Expensive. Gained literally a thousand pounds since the last generation. In some ways just an elaborate simulation and can feel as heavy and robotic as it looks.

Takeaway: The M5 demonstrates how driving fast cars fast isn’t as fun (or nearly as dangerous) as it used to be.

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