Gadgetory

you and you're definitely with the new x5s a more otherwise a quick spotters guide includes very much a softer look a down the sides of the car a very busy angular aggressive face on our M car of course Em'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 now an x5 M isn't just a performance car it's a profit car and a status car and this one's beautifully turned out I mean look at this kind of chainmail - trim hearing on the doors and we've got this power tilt up acoustic dispersion thing on the dash part of an almost 4,000 dollar Bang & Olufsen audio upgrade and of course M style sports 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 pinch and zoom touch pad on top of the knob 2 of my favorite features though include the connected drive menu which has the BMW online to go do relatively freeform online search basically for things you want to NAV - the downside is dog SLO 3G the other nice touch I do want to 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 in the infotainment which we've seen before let's get to the drive controls that means so much when you've got an M car put it simply there are more ways to set up this powertrain than there are to leave your lover I counted at least 60 we start here with a very different shifter this is an M style shifter 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 on the gearbox 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 acure electric steering rack aid you're going in a straight line by the way there's no assist at all to keep the energy loss as low it only dives in when you move the wheel and all of these different settings can be mushed together and saved under two macros you see there on the steering wheel M 1 and M 2 now the other big basket of driving tech is under this one but here is your driver assist technologies which they call intelligent safety frontal collision warning technology and it also aids braking to have collision mitigation pedestrian warning where the vehicles going to 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 in 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 now up here under the schnozz of our x5 amp it's a four point four liter v8 kind of quake but very modern with its fully adjustable valve train the BMW is famous for direct injection of course and the turbos you could almost call it a quad turbo setup because they have dual twin-scroll turbo one on each bank 567 or sets up three percent last year and five hundred fifty-three pound-feet of torque that's up 10 percent zero to sixty even though it weighs fifty two hundred 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 ex 5ms 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 is Mother Superior regardless of mode so much so that the x5 M actually rattles on iffy pavement in spite of its 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 nestled inside a big vehicle the only exception is when you're cruising in Top Gear and need something right now then it takes a moment to unbundle the OverDrive's at no point that I wish this car had a manual or dual clutch by the way all wheel drive is biased toward the rear but it can do a hundred percent there or to the front and can split torque across the rear axle to turn the car in not just point mx-5s have always been premium suvs and once you go and you're really premium that's why we're talking a hundred thousand dollars to start then you got to add three things to go seen that style and I think skip to others driver assist Plus is less than two grand 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 forty five hundred bucks so 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's 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 bno for 3,700 I bet the 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 the center stack I'm really not all they were pushing 107 grand the way I would do it that's nowhere near fully loaded the x5 m is a specialized vehicle and you've got to be comfortable this idea of a large ish 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 to the concept there are plenty of other very capable fives that don't have the ammo you