2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring Review: It’s Awesome But Also Flawed

As much as I enjoyed my time with the BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring, the quickest wagon I’ve ever driven, I couldn’t shake a few nagging thoughts. Its straight-line performance, remarkable cornering ability given its weight, and exterior design all work in its favor, but it’s far from perfect. Some odd interior design choices detract from its appeal, as does a battery that just doesn’t have enough range for a vehicle this powerful and thirsty, which ruins much of its grand tourer allure.

Comfort and Ride Quality

This is the kind of car that, even in sporty M Sport guise with stiffer suspension and 20-inch wheels like my tester, gracefully wafts you along in complete serenity. It really is remarkably comfortable, thanks to its adaptive dampers and standard self-leveling rear air suspension. When I first saw this very well-equipped press fleet car with its 20-inch wheels, I thought the ride was going to suffer, but over the extended weekend that I spent with the car, it proved me completely wrong.

Performance and Handling

Put the suspension in its stiff setting, and you instantly feel the entire car tighten up. Thanks to the 48-volt electrical system, BMW was able to equip this vehicle with active antiroll bars that make body roll a thing of the past. Throw this car into a corner at speed, and the absence of body roll will make it feel like you are bending the laws of physics. It’s a very unusual sensation of not having any lean through corners. Some drivers, myself included, prefer a bit more body motion, but the complete lack of it somehow felt more suitable in this futuristic electric car than in other vehicles. One that springs to mind is the BMW X6 M60i that I drove a while back, where some body roll would have been welcome and would have helped improve my confidence to take corners quickly.

Flooring it on corner exit, you unleash the 600 horsepower and 604 pound-feet of torque and are instantly pinned to your seat. The acceleration is relentless, and if you pull on the steering wheel-mounted Boost paddle, even more oomph is unlocked for 10 seconds, accompanied by a more aggressive acceleration sound, especially in Sport mode. The claimed 0 to 60 mph time of 3.7 seconds doesn’t do the car justice.

The BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring feels quicker than that even without using the brutal launch control function, which also vibrates the wheels to add some extra excitement. To me, this felt like a sub-3.5-second to sixty car, with enough punch to put the fear of EVs into your friends. After a couple of hard launches, one of the people I took for a ride in the i5 M60 wagon asked me to pull over for a breather so that he could get his heart rate back under control.

Exterior and Interior Design, and Aesthetics

Whenever I walked to or from the car, I always gave it a second glance and thought it was a looker. I’m not the biggest fan of the G60 sedan, but the G61 wagon hides the new model’s extra height and is the more elegant of the two. My tester was finished in BMW Individual Deep Frozen Grey, which I thought looked fantastic and further helped the i5 Touring look lower and more compact.

This was my second time in a new 5 Series after I drove the 520d a few months ago, and I prefer this i5’s sportier flavor with the M Sport steering wheel and dark headliner. The things I didn’t like are the same as on the sedan: some of the plastics lower down in the cabin feel cheap, as do the indicator and wiper stalks. I also can’t understand why BMW eliminated the nets or pockets on the backs of the front seats, and I checked the configurator—it doesn’t look like you can get them on any version. Is this a cost-cutting measure?

Rear Seat and Trunk Space

Considering that the new 5 Series has the longest wheelbase in the nameplate’s history, almost matching that of a 7 Series from two generations ago, rear knee room could have been more plentiful. I appreciated that the rear seat is high enough so the floor doesn’t push your knees up like in so many other electric vehicles built on combustion car platforms.

The trunk was just okay. It is reasonably roomy at just over 20 cubic feet, with a wide opening and rear seats that fold flat, but it’s not as big as you might think by looking at the car’s rear end. With the rear seats down, load volume expands to 60 cubic feet, still less than the X3, which offers up to 62.7 cubic feet. The almost complete absence of any underfloor storage in the trunk (not even a place for the charging cables) might explain the lower capacity.

Battery and Range Issues

The i5 Touring M60’s biggest problem is the small battery pack combined with a high power consumption. With a fully charged battery, the car never showed more than 231 miles of range, calculated for its electricity consumption since new, about 2.6 miles per kilowatt-hour. That’s way off BMW’s optimistic WLTP estimate of 3.4 to 3.1 miles per kWh. During my time with the car, focused on enjoying its performance, my average was less than 2 miles per kWh, which wouldn’t even get the car to 170 miles on a full charge. That’s simply unacceptable in a car that feels like such an accomplished grand tourer with this much power.

Should I Buy The BMW i5 M60 Touring?

This BMW i5 M60 Touring needs a larger battery pack and improved tuning for better efficiency. Had BMW given this car the larger 105.2 kWh battery from the iX instead of the 84 kWh pack with 81.2 usable kWh, it would have made more sense. The iX is EPA-rated at 324 miles, while the i5 M60 sedan only gets 240 miles.

Sure, a bigger battery would add extra weight to a car already quite hefty, but the platform can handle more weight, as shown by the new M5. I wanted to like the i5 M60 xDrive Touring, and in many ways, I did, but its shortcomings keep it from being truly great. When you’re paying almost €130,000 (my tester cost nearly €30,000 in options), it might not live up to your expectations. The recently overhauled Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo is more expensive and less practical, but it’s a better electric super wagon than the i5 and has more range even when driven briskly.