From £79,5307
BMW adds speed to its legendary super saloon, but fails to add value or address the M5's biggest shortcomings

What is it?

This is BMW’s latest and greatest BMW M5 super-saloon, which has received a series of tweaks for the 2014 model year.

It has a new kidney grille design, some optional adaptive LED headlights, an updated colour palette, and new leathers and interior trims. And there’s an obligatory power hike and chassis tweak as part of the revision, of course – but only for those buyers who are willing to pay extra for it.

BMW’s ‘competition package’ is a £6700 option available not just on the BMW M5, but all three versions of the M6 (coupé, convertible and Gran Coupé) as well. It adds 15bhp to the top-end power delivery of the car’s twin-turbo V8 engine, doing nothing for mid-range torque and leaving official economy and emissions unaltered.

But that’s enough to shave a tenth of a second off the car’s 0-62mph acceleration claim. This is now a two-tonne luxury BMW that’ll roar to that speed in just 4.2sec: faster than a Ferrari 360 Modena.

Top speed remains electronically pegged at 155mph – which seems a bit odd for a competition-branded option on a car that would otherwise easily smash through the 200mph barrier. But there you go.

Alongside the engine changes, the competition package brings with it new 20in rims, a firmed-up tune for the variably damped suspension, a new power steering calibration and more aggressive settings for the active M Differential.

It doesn’t bring with it the one thing this car desperately needs if you’re going to fully deploy its power and weight on a circuit: better brakes. Standard M5 brakes have long been about as useful on track as chocolate crockery.

In the case of the current car, they’ll fade within five full-pace laps – as our track testing has confirmed. You can upgrade to BMW’s carbon-ceramics, but only if you’re willing to spend another £7395.

So even though items like Professional Multimedia nav, DAB radio and sports seats are standard, equipping this car to what we’d consider optimum equipment level makes it a £92k purchase. Which sounds like rather a lot for a go-faster 5-series, and which gives the car plenty to do to justify its place in the world.

What's it like?

Duplicitous is putting it politely. Which isn’t to imply that the car’s untrustworthy – just that it’s capable of remarkably well-mannered refinement and ease of use one moment, and then absolutely first-order grip, iron body control and incredible performance the next.

‘Comfort’ mode engages on the Drive Performance Control module as a default when you start the engine and move off. That leaves plenty of compliance in the suspension, adds plenty of assistance to the steering, makes the gearbox ease the car away smoothly and shift ratios in very laid-back mode.

The BMW M5’s totally unwearing and absurdly easy-to drive like this. You could cover hundreds of miles, entirely untroubled in the multi-adjustable sports seats, in convincing luxury.

Move upwards into ‘Sport’ and ‘Sport+’ modes on the steering, powertrain, chassis and DSC systems and purposefulness quickly muscles its way into the driving experience. Most notably, the hand wheel goes from heavy to absurdly heavy if you let it, and the ride quality loses that pleasing compliance entirely, riveting the M5’s body to the ground on smooth surfaces, but making it crash and jolt unhelpfully on anything less-than-smooth.

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It’s debatable if, even in its firmest state, the M5 allows its driver to connect with it any more meaningfully now than it did at launch. The extra weight in the steering requires effort levels way beyond the realm of delicacy, and it’s not obvious if there’s any more feedback – pertaining either to the state of the front contact patches or the amount of force exerted through the front suspension – available through it.

‘Sport+’ mode on the suspension, meanwhile, is much too hard to work on British roads. The optimum setting for fast road use is achieved by mixing ‘Comfort’ and ‘Sport’ modes on the M5’s various systems – but it shouldn’t be so hard to dial up. And even when achieved, it doesn’t provide you with quite the kind of body control and handling we’d like the setting to.

The BMW M5 is either abruptly disturbed over bumps that wouldn’t trouble a well-sorted sports saloon, or simply allowed too much vertical freedom to move over them. The fact is, you can have over-firm dampers, or under-firm ones – but never a set-up quite like a properly tuned, expensive-feeling passive damper might deliver.

Directional stability and cornering balance is good where imperfect surfaces don’t come into play. The chassis grips very hard indeed, and can be driven very quickly and smoothly, or as exuberantly sideways as you like with the electronics disabled.

BMW’s new diff settings have added a bit of extra progressiveness to the car’s limit handling, but the original car never seemed unwilling to oblige the hooligan in us either.

Overarching all of that, though, is the sense of incredible outright speed the car delivers at full power. Partly because the engine’s so docile under less throttle, but mostly because there’s just so much grunt, the M5 never fails to amaze when you downshift a couple of times and bury the pedal.

An engine that felt mighty before now feels almost omnipotent: capable, you’d guess, of running with GTRs and 911 Turbos and Ferrari 458s once it’s hit full stride. Magnificent, really.

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Should I buy one?

Well, you probably will anyway. Nobody who’s genuinely in the market for an M5 is likely to settle for a smaller portion of oomph.

But for our money, the £7k brake upgrade is a much more important and effective buy than the £7k performance upgrade – and truth be told, BMW should have been generous enough to offer both for the price.

A standard BMW M5 is a very fast car. An M5 Competition Pack variant ought to be an even faster, even better one – and while it may be the former, it’s not obviously the latter.

The more involving Mercedes E63 AMG S would definitely figure more highly on our shopping list and – if the idea doesn’t offend you – even a Vauxhall VXR8 GTS offers more charm and driver reward.

BMW M5 Competition Pack

Price £80,205; 0-62mph 4.2sec; Top speed 155mph (limited); Economy 28.5mpg; CO2 232g/km; Kerbweight 1945kg; Engine type, cc V8, 4395cc, twin-turbocharged petrol; Power 567bhp at 6000-7000rpm; Torque 502lb ft 1500-5750rpm; Gearbox 7-spd M-DCT semi-automatic

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce PhantomTesla RoadsterAriel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren SennaRenault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.

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Brecks 10 April 2014

LCI M5

As An Owner of the new LCI M5 I can honestly say the Jaguar does not come close, if it did I would buy one.
It never ceases to make me laugh how people jump on the wagon of these "5 minute test driving Mag writers" and agree with every word.
I test drove ALL the high end performance Cars and the M5 was the best all rounder by miles.
Mine was brand new all extras and I got a 13K discount.
You try getting that from ANY other brand.
Nuff said, if you can't afford one, go comment on some cheap crap that you can.
Overdrive 12 April 2014

Brecks wrote:As An Owner of

Brecks wrote:

As An Owner of the new LCI M5 I can honestly say the Jaguar does not come close, if it did I would buy one.
It never ceases to make me laugh how people jump on the wagon of these "5 minute test driving Mag writers" and agree with every word.
I test drove ALL the high end performance Cars and the M5 was the best all rounder by miles.
Mine was brand new all extras and I got a 13K discount.
You try getting that from ANY other brand.
Nuff said, if you can't afford one, go comment on some cheap crap that you can.

Evo magazine did a (pretty comprehensive) supersaloon test not too long ago and it also picked the M5 as the best overall. It's obvious that these days Autocar doesn't think very highly of the BMW M cars. For example the maagzine puts the M135i (highly praised elsewhere) 4th in its hot hatch top 5. So, I guess it depends whose view one finds more credible.

405line 9 April 2014

It's a barge, that's why

The problem with the current 5 series is that conceptually it's a small 7 series rather than a large 3 series, i mean look at it, it certainly don't look like it "wants" to be driven hard....too much of a limo as far as i am concerned.
david RS 8 April 2014

BMW, make rather a revisited

BMW, make rather a revisited E34 M5 than this Playstation gas plant...