Now if you're not familiar with the new X5s, M or otherwise, a quick spotters guide includes very much a softer look down the sides of the car.
A very busy, angular, aggressive face on our M car of course.
M's also get these functional scoops down on each lower chin corner.
As well as a set of functional blade exits right behind the front wheels.
And the badging is a dead giveaway as well.
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Now An X5 M isn't just a performance car, it's a profit car, and a status car, and this one is beautifully turned out.
I mean look at this kind of chain mail dash trim here and on the doors, and we've got this power tilt up acoustic dispersion thing on the dash.
Part of an almost $4,000 Bang and Olefsen audio upgrade, and of course in style sport seats, but let's get down to the technology.
We've seen the iDrive head unit before.
It's wide, and big, and bold.
It looks like it moves Up and down.
It doesn't.
It's not touch, of course.
It's German.
Nothing too new on the controller, turn, kick, click, and writing, and pitch and zoom touchpad on top of the knob.
Two of my favorite features, though, include the ConnectedDrive menu which It has the BMW online to go to relatively free form online search, basically for things you wanna nav to, but downside is, dog slow 3G.
The other nice touch I do wanna call out here is how they do satellite radio, You can change the way it lists the channels by either channel name, or by artist name.
That's a much smarter way to look at channels than by their name.
But enough of the infotainment, which we've seen before, let's get to the drive controls that mean so much when you've got an M car.
Put it simply, there are more ways to set up this power train than there are to leave your lover.
I counted at least Sixty.
We start here with a very different shifter.
This is an M style shifter.
It has no park position.
You can tell immediately you're in an M car.
And below that you've got three profiles for what they call drive logic.
This is the aggression and how hard it holds the various RPM points of the gear box.
Over to the left, that little speedometer looking thing, that's your power delivery.
How aggressive it ramps up power delivery under the pedal.
Below that, you've got your suspension settings.
Again, three levels also.
We have air suspension in this vehicle.
Also, an active anti-roll technology.
And below that, that tells what nature of steering assist you've got, from the pure electric steering rack aid.
If you're going in a straight line, by the way, there's no assist at all to keep the energy losses low.
It only dives in when you move the wheel.
And all of these different settings can be mucked together and saved under two macros you see there on the steering wheel, M1 and M2.
Now, the other big basket of driving tech is under this one button here.
This is your driver assist technology, which they call intelligent safety.
Frontal collision warning technology And it also aids braking to have collision mitigation.
Pedestrian Warning, where the vehicle is gonna see pedestrians in front of you and give you warning.
Lane Departure Warning is exactly that.
It's a warning with a stick shaker on the wheel if you're drifting out of your lane.
And you get some indicators on the dash, but the vehicle doesn't bring you back in by itself, and finally, what they call active blind spot detection, which isn't really active, again, it doesn't bring you back from a collision, it just warns you of a collision.
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Now up here under the schnoz of our X5M is a 4.4 liter V8.
Kind of quaint, but very modern with its fully adjustable valve train that BMW's famous for Direct injection, of course.
And the turbos, you could almost call it a quad turbo set up because they have dual twin scroll turbos, one on each bag.
567 horse, that's up from 3% last year and 553 pound feet of toque, that's up 10%.
Zero to 60 even though it weighs 5,200 pounds is a flat four seconds.
That's getting up and going.
Your MPG is where you do pay the piper a bit, 14/19.
I would imagine if this wasn't an exempt truck style SUV it would have a gas guzzler tax, but it doesn't.
And these X5 Ms are all eight speed automatics, not dual clutch, but a straight up Fluid based torque converter automatic.
And they're all, all wheel drive.
Underway, one word, hard.
The seats are kind of like church pews, and the suspension is unforgiving as mother superior, regardless of mode.
So much so that the X5M actually rattles on iffy pavement in spite of it's rear air suspension and active dampers.
The power comes on nice and hard, too, and it's easy to modulate.
That's high praise for a turbo.
nestled inside a big vehicle.
The only exception is when you're cruising in top gear, and you need something right.
Then it takes a moment to unbundle the overdrives.
At no point do I wish this car had a manual or dual clutch by the way.
All wheel drive is biased towards the rear, but can do 100% there, or to the front.
And can split towards across the rear axle to turn the car in, not just point it [NOISE] Now X5's have always been premium in SUVs and once you go in, you're really premium.
That's why we're talking a $100000 to start.
Then you've got to add three things to go see that style, and I think skip two others.
Driver assist plus is less than two grand and for a whole slew of driver assist technologies that I think are a good value.
The executive package makes me grit my teeth.
It's 4500 bucks and I only want about half of what it brings, like the hud The active LED headlights.
I could live without the ventilated seats and heated rears, but that' the package.
The joy of driving this thing does not include parking it, so spend the paltry five bills on parking assist to handle the steering.
I'll skip the B and O for 3,700.
I'll base Harman Kardon sounds really good.
And I'm not sold on night vision cameras yet in general, and when they're way over in In the center stack, I'm really not, although we're pushing 107 grand the way I would do it, and that's nowhere near fully loaded.
The X5M is a specialized vehicle and you've gotta be comfortable with this idea of a largish SUV that is also a track machine.
I don't know that it makes a lot of sense, but if you want it, you want it, and this does it exceptionally well.
If you're not convinced of the concept, there are plenty of other very capable fives that don't have the ammo.
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