BMW 5 Series
Our favourite luxury saloon is faced with the task of living up to its award-winning status in everyday use
Our 2017 Car of the Year joins the eet
Mileage 3284 List price £36,080 Target Price £34,751 Price as tested £43,000 Test economy 44.6mpg
AS ANY ENGLAND football fan will tell you, high expectations are often a precursor to disappointment. However, the latest BMW 5 Series more than lives up to the standards set by its illustrious predecessors, having earned a five-star What Car? rating and beaten the likes of the Mercedes-benz E-class and Jaguar XF in group tests.
The latest 5 Series moves the luxury class on to such an extent, in fact, that we named it our overall Car of the Year for 2017. To put that achievement into perspective, in the 40-year history of the What Car? Awards, just two other BMWS have taken this title: the 3 Series in 2006 and the 7 Series way back in 1988.
In particular, what blew us away when we first tested the latest 5 Series was how comfortable, refined and classy it felt, bettering not only direct rivals but also luxury saloons that cost three times as much.
If you really want to get to know a car, though, there’s no substitute for living with it, day in, day out, so we’ve now added a 5 Series to our long-term test fleet. Over the next few months I’ll be using it primarily for family duties and the daily commute, and seeing if it still manages to feel as special.
The model we’ve gone for is the 520d diesel, because this is easily the biggest seller. Or, to be more accurate, it’s easily the most popular version among the company car drivers that make up the bulk of 5 Series ‘owners’, due to its low CO2 emissions and correspondingly low benefit-in-kind tax bills.
While most people prefer the more aggressive looks of M Sport trim, however,
we’ve stuck with the cheaper SE, because it has smaller wheels that improve the ride, while still coming equipped with everything from satellite navigation and leather upholstery to front and rear parking sensors and a slick eight-speed automatic gearbox.
BMW also offers a long list of optional extras, many of which you can do without. But I would recommend the Electronic Damper Control system (£985), because this lets you soften or firm up the suspension to suit the road conditions and your mood. In addition, I think £895 for electric front seats with driver’s memory is money well spent, because it means I can quickly restore my ideal driving position after someone else has used the car. And although it feels a bit cheeky of BMW to charge £335 for split-folding rear seats, these do bring useful extra versatility.
Until now, I’ve been running another 5 Series rival, the Volvo S90, and I’ve been generally impressed. But as much as I like the S90, I have to say my familiarity with it highlights how much better the 5 Series is in key areas. For starters, while both cars are hushed motorway cruisers, the engine in the 5 Series is far smoother around town and when cold. Plus, the S90 feels like the heavyweight it is on winding roads, whereas the 5 Series disguises its bulk brilliantly when you put it in Sport mode, while still remaining supple enough to take the sting out of most bumps. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is in their respective infotainment systems. The S90 features a large touchscreen that looks smart and lets you swipe, pinch and scroll, as you do with your tablet. But while this sounds good in theory, the system is actually rather slow to respond and forces you to take your eyes off the road in order to hit the various icons. By contrast, the latest iteration of BMW’S idrive set-up is almost impossible to fault. As in the S90, the screen is touch-sensitive, so you can quickly punch a destination into the sat-nav when stationary, but there’s also a rotary dial and some shortcut buttons that are far less distracting to use on the move. When you add in the fact that the menus are more intuitive to scroll through, there’s none of the S90’s sluggishness and the voice control actually understands what you’re saying, it’s hugely impressive.
I may be just a few weeks into my time with the 5 Series, then, but so far it’s showing itself to be fully worthy of its Car of the Year status. If it were a national football team, it would be, well, Germany.
‘My familiarity with the Volvo S90 highlights how much better the 5 Series is in key areas’