Is the BMW 5-series still the best?
The evolution of the 5-series takes its biggest leap forward this year. Paul Owen samples the techno delights of the 540i.
The world’s oldest car mag, Britain’s Autocar, didn’t pull any punches when BMW unveiled the fourthgeneration E39 5 series back in the mid-1990s. The mag’s European editor at the time, Peter Robinson, happily declared it to be the ‘‘finest car in the world’’.
Across the Atlantic, the praise was just as fulsome and lacking in inhibition. Consumer Reports gave the E39 the highest score they’d ever awarded to an automobile, while Car and Driver magazine kept the fourth 5-series on its top 10 best cars list for six years.
It was little wonder that annual sales of the Five topped more than 200,000 for the first time with the launch of the E39.
In the ensuing years after that surge in popularity and the setting of new dynamic benchmarks, the Five would face new challenges as it evolved into further generations.
For the fifth-generation E60, released in 2004, that challenge to its success would come from the two radicals who shaped it, Chris Bangle and Adrian van Hooydonk. An elegant car had just been hit with the ugly stick, wrote someone located not too far from this keyboard, while the world’s first automotive mouse-style controller, the Apple-inspired iDrive, was shockingly unintuitive to use.
The E60 so turned off customers that BMW had to speed up the model cycle of the 5-series, and the more accessible design of the F10 generation car helped steady the ship when it appeared in 2009.
The iDrive now had the essential ‘‘back’’ button added to it, and the whole car was spun from the same development program as the larger 7-series. Elegance made a welcome return to the form of the Five, and such was the increased popularity of the F10 that BMW had to up its production forecasts for it by 50 per cent.
This sets the scene for this year’s debut of the newest Five in this market, as the new G30 generation car is even more 7-like than the F10. I defy anyone to tell the two Beemer saloons apart without first checking their length with a tape measure. The stats will tell you that the 7 is 170mm longer than the 5, and has an extra 95mm of longitudinal real estate between the front and rear wheels.
If you like the idea of that extra space, be warned that you will have to pay rather a lot more for it. The optioned-up 740d xDrive tested last year cost $235,700 after several boxes were ticked to inflate the price from its $199,000 base. This rear-drive 540i turbo-petrol six lists for $142,900 before the $4990 Technology Package (display key, remote control parking, Apple CarPlay preparation) is added to it.
Remote Control Parking? Don’t get too excited and expect the 540i to valet park itself. You need to line up the BMW with the chosen space, then get out and stand close to it as you press the bit of the key that makes it go either straightforward or straight-back at walking pace.
It’s handy enough in Europe, where parking building spaces haven’t kept pace with automotive trends towards wider car bodies, as you no longer have to be contortionist to get either into or out of the car when it’s parked. But New Zealand parking spaces aren’t quite so mean in their width.
Like the showy display key that comes with it, the RCP makes a great party talking point, but its real-world practicality is more questionable. And woe betide anyone dropping that bulky key, with its vulnerable TFT colour screen. It won’t be cheap to replace.
Of course, I could devote more space to the technology of the newest Five, and how it’ll do everything that the Mercedes E-class does and then a bit more. For there are no less than three sporty driving modes for the car, which is probably to be expected in what was once the driving pleasure benchmark for mid-sized luxury saloons.
But forget all that lane-monitoring, automatic lanechanging, emergency braking, pollen/pollution filtering stuff, the essential question to ask of the 540i is this: does it drive as well as the E39 forebear that wore the same boot-mounted model badge?
The answer is yes, and no. The positive is found in the excellent powertrain of the Beemer, where 3.0 single-turbo six kicks the butt of the E39’s 4.0-litre V8 by developing 250kW and 450Nm of motivating force, enough to punt the car from 0-100kmh in 5.3 seconds. Fuel consumption plummets to a lab-tested 6.9 litres100km, and although you’ll easily double the number when driving with a heavy foot, it’s still way better than the 18 litres/100km returns I used to get from an E39 V8 when driven in a similar fashion.
The negative is found in the steering of the G30. The wheel feels over-assisted even when the car is placed in a sporty mode, and the car doesn’t seem to have quite the same agility as its smaller forebears. Still, it does offer better body roll control than the floatier E-class, while delivering an equally comfortable ride when driven with the adaptive dampers in the appropriate setting.
So, finest car in the world? It’s close, but I feel reluctant to hand out the cigars.