Top gear bmw x5

Top gear bmw x5

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Top Gear’s guilty pleasures: the BMW X5 (E53)

Top Gear’s BMW X5 review

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BMW X5 M Competition review

It’s the M car the world wants right now, not the one it needs. The BMW X5 M Competition splices the drivetrain of BMW’s sublime M5 super-saloon with the body, high driving position and ‘move over, I’m running late for an appointment with the free-weights room’ demeanour of BMW’s middle-sized X5. The global thirst for SUVs means the X7 and a future X8 now top the X5 and X6 twins in BMW’s SUV ranks. An X5 isn’t anything close to a flagship these days. Not that the X5 M lacks… anything, really. In the UK, we’re only flogged the range-topping Competition variant, because what sort of self-respecting oaf-dun-well could be expected to tool around with merely 592bhp on tap? The Comp’s twin-turbo’d 4.4-litre V8 is remapped up to 616bhp, though torque remains pegged at 553lb ft.

The result is a school bus that goes like greased excrement off a garden spade. Engage launch control and the X5 M dispatches 0-62mph in 3.8 seconds. Should you be minded to get to 124mph, this dump truck of oomph will blast you there in 13.4 seconds – 0.3sec faster than the poor, pathetic man’s X5 M. Loser. Spend £2,100 on the optional M Driver’s Package and your top speed leaps from 155mph to 190mph. Is there a word in German for ‘enough’? All that punch means the X5 M Comp is a bargain. Stay with us here – this monsterwagen is very nearly as quick as the likes of a Lamborghini Urus or Bentley Bentayga Speed. It’s just as well-equipped, seats the same number of people in space and comfort, but it costs a mere £110,610. We just saved you £60,000.

The X5 M Comp is as close as BMW will tread to building an M5 estate, but this isn’t quite a jacked-up M5. While it shares the same engine, eight-speed automatic gearbox and rear-focused four-wheel drive system, someone at M headquarters had the common sense to ditch the M5’s rear-wheel drive mode. They were likely fired shortly thereafter. While you can’t fully disconnect the front driveshafts at the twiddle of the iDrive knob, BMW says ‘controlled drifts’ are possible in the X5 M, once you’ve summoned up the 4WD Sport mode, switched off the traction control, and hired a large expanse of open space for the afternoon. Gatwick Airport would do. Or New Mexico.

Underneath, very little standard X5 remains. The M’s engine mounts are beefier, as are the suspension foundations. You get adaptive dampers with body-roll counteraction. The cooling and oil systems are approved for racetrack use. There’s more camber, fatter tyres, enormous brakes and you can even change the feel through the brake pedal, for no good reason we can think of.

For £110k, you’d expect plenty of kit. You get 21 inch rims up front, and 22s out back. There’s a menacing quad exhaust pipe kit, awful illuminated ‘M’ motifs in the multi-adjustable leather seats, and a practical split tailgate to impress none of the farmers who’ll be buying one. Oh, and there’s no hybrid system buried deep in the car’s bowels. No 48-volt boost or Eco Mode. This is a full-fat, blood’and-thunder zero f**ks given BMW. More green hell than Green Party. Whether you like the idea of German uber-SUVs or not, there’s no denying that the majority of them – Porsche’s Cayenne, the heavily Audi’fied Urus and several AMG 4x4s – are pretty bloody impressive pieces of engineering, even if their morality is flawed. BMW’s M Division tanks have ranged from the so-so (the old X5 M, for instance) to the downright shoddy (we’re looking at you, X3 M.) So, has BMW pulled a true performance hero out of the bag this time, or given the world a 180mph pudding it doesn’t need and doesn’t deserve either?

Our choice from the range

What’s the verdict?

There’s possibly no car on sale today that’s as configurable as the X5 M. Jumping in this thing to go for a drive is like firing up your Xbox for a quick 15-minute game and discovering it needs fifty terabytes of updates downloading. Those M1 and M2 favourite-settings keys will come in handy if you want to exploit this lunatic’s enormous reserves of computing power – and horsepower – every morning. This thing’s the definition of ‘over the top’. What sets the X5 M Competition apart from the rest of the super-SUV set is how much respect it demands away from bone-dry, arrow straight roads. This isn’t a high-rise teleportation pouch like an Audi, Bentley or even Lamborghini’s Germanic Urus. Perhaps the M Division’s been stung by the notion it doesn’t make scalpel-sharp serious drivers’ cars any more. Either way, the X5 M Comp can be a proper handful. Not a person on the planet needs this much potency from their family SUV. Even an X5 M50i is already taking the mickey, and it’s £35,000 cheaper. You could spend that on a Golf GTI. The X5 M has a lot more AMG DNA – and maybe even a dash of the Range Rover Sport SVR’s demonic possession – lurking about it than BMW would prefer to admit. Someone on the sign-off team has been enjoying slithering about in a GLC 63, we’d wager. So, if you just want a well-badged, over-endowed all-weather land chariot to lope about in, you should probably take your six-figure bank balance elsewhere. Or grown up, you show-off. The X5 M isn’t for you. This is an SUV that – despite physics, common sense and the sheer engineering challenge involved – has turned out to be seriously good fun, if a bit scary. The world needed that, didn’t it?

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Top Gear’s guilty pleasures: the BMW X5 (E53)

Try this on for size. Upon its launch at the London Motor Show in 1999, BMW UK proudly trumpeted the fact that its new 4×4 was shorter than its then 5 Series (the E39). And consider that the E39 is a fraction off a current 3 Series saloon, and you get some idea of how small this big car really was.

And it was a big car. It was BMW’s first ever SUV at a time when only the Mercedes-Benz ML and Range Rover ruled the high roads. Then this swaggering, steroidal 5er came along and literally changed the game. Changed the name, too, because BMW wanted to make sure you didn’t confuse it with anything that had come before.

“This is not, in American parlance, a Sports Utility Vehicle but rather a Sports Activity Vehicle or SAV,” BMW UK’s press release said upon the car’s 1999 launch. “BMW has made this distinction in terminology to distinguish X5 from the wide variety of 4×4 vehicles available on the UK market today.”

Indeed, a cursory glance through that initial press release is revealing, for it’s a moment in history when people weren’t really used to these kinds of monsters on the roads. “Its high seating position provides the commanding road view so valued by 4×4 drivers,” BMW said, “yet its styling is more like that of a car.”

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Handled like a car, too, which was the point. “It has the driving dynamics of a BMW car,» and early road tests proved what witchcraft Munich had conjured to make something weighing two tonnes handle like a lithe sports saloon. Today that’s expected and the bar to entry high, but in 1999? Unheard of.

So unheard of, early spy shots hilariously saw BMW hammering around the Nürburgring in a prototype X5 ahead of the car’s reveal, upon which the company announced it had put a time on the board. The 4.4i X5 managed 9m 30s, which BMW UK said at the time was 30 seconds slower than the-then current M3 (which would have been the E36). Thirty seconds is a long time of course, but the fact it had even managed anything this side of 10m was seriously impressive.

The 0-62mph sprint was similarly impressive (for the time) – 7.5s in that launch V8, an engine shared across BMW’s flagship 5 and 7 saloon cars, which had 286bhp and 324lb ft of torque, while the top speed was 129mph.

At the time it was a quite a sight to see a BMW sit so high and wide on the road, but now that nearly everything that comes out of Munich has an ‘X’ in its name and can leap tall buildings in a single bound, this first-generation car looks almost… compact. Neat. Tightly focused and fresh. A certain Mr Frank Stephenson was the person in charge of sketching out the original X5.

So yes, burnish it with whatever stereotypes you like – including a police SWAT team’s vehicle of choice – but to our eyes (OK, my eyes), the E53 X5 is a fabulous car. Before I see myself out, one final flourish: soon after the car’s launch, BMW unveiled a Super Heavyweight SAV in the shape of the X5 LM. Under the auspices of one Albert Biermann – then boss of M, now boss of Hyundai N – engineers shoved the 6.1-litre V12 from BMW’s Le Mans-winning prototype under the nose of the E53 and set its 700 horsepowers free to do outrageous bidding. Try that on for size.

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