2018 BMW M5 driving modes: Race-ready performance at your fingertips

Meet the 2018 BMW M5, the ultimate driving machine. And I'm not just poking fun of BMW's long standing tag line. I mean that the M5 is an extremely customizable ride able to switch seamlessly between a comfortable road car and a surprisingly confident choice for the race track despite its large size. The drivers toggle between these settings with the M Dynamic Drive system, these red buttons on the steering wheel labelled M1 and M2. Now I've got M1 set for Sport and M2 set for the most hardcore Sport + setting. But drivers can save whatever combination of drive mode settings they like to these buttons for quick access on the road. And now, I'm gonna show you how. Now I mentioned you've got the M1 and M2 buttons on the steering wheel that can control the different drive mode presets. But now I wanna show you how to customize those using the good old fashion iDrive infotainment that you'll find in the dashboard of pretty much every BMW of this generation. But this one has a couple of bespoke performance features. for the M5. Now to get to the screen we're looking for, there is a button here on the center console labeled "Setup". That's going to bring us to the "MSetup" screen where you have the different prefects for the M1 and M2 so if you go into those you'll find the different settings. First is going to be dynamic stability control. You can either leave that on like normal, set it to a medium setting that's going to let things get a little more loosey goosey and dynamic or just Turned it off. Now, if you turn it off, you'll notice the M xDrive setting gets a couple more options lit up. You can set it between regular four wheel drive, four wheel drive sport, that's a little more rear bias, or finally a two wheel drive setting that sends all of the power to the rear wheels. That's sort of a more Classic m5 driving experience. Now the next setting is gonna be engine and there you have sport, sport plus and efficient settings. And you also have settings for chassis and steering. Those are both gonna have sport, sport plus and comfort settings. Now under the transmission you actually have six different settings. There are three sport modes that get progressively firmer in their shift speed. And then you have three drive modes that are gonna be emphasizing efficient and smooth shifting in traffic. So you have a lot of fine tune control over Over how the eight speed automatic transmission works. Now the last setting here is gonna be the head-up display and there you're gonna choose between a standard view or an M view that sort of puts more of an emphasis on a large tachometer when you're driving. Now once you have your M1 and M2 setting set up, you'll actually be able to just tap the button on the steering wheel to quickly pull up those presets. Now If your setting turns off stability control or disables it in any sort of way, you're gonna have to do a double tap just to confirm that you're okay with maybe losing a little bit of control, or maybe gaining control depending on how you look at it. Now, if at any point, you want to change any of those individual settings, there are actually hardware buttons don't here on the center console. So, on the shifter we've got a rocker that toggles between the different shift firmness settings. We also have buttons For the engine, the suspension, and the steering settings as well as an exhaust mode setting. So you can toggle all of those and fine-tune them on the road even if you want to change the setting a little bit from your preset. Now the rest of the iDrive system is pretty much your standard fare setup that we've seen in other BMWs of this generation. If you're interested in how that infotainment stuff works, I recommend you check out. One of our other tech deep dives on this generation of BMW vehicles. Other than that, that's been your look at how you change the M Drive mode presets on the 2018 BMW M5. If you don't mind, I think I'm gonna get back on the road. [MUSIC]