Is BMW’s X5 xDrive50e M Sport the Taylor Swift of cars?
I admit that BMW’s X5 xDrive50e M Sport is technically brilliant. But like many modern cars, it leaves me cold.
Motoring journalists used to be incredibly demanding. They wanted a car to be perfect, and when it was, they wanted it to be more perfect.
By comparison, film critics were lax and slap-happy. They showered The Godfather with praise, saying it was a blemish-free example of movie making. A motoring journalist wouldn’t have done that. They’d have looked at Michael Corleone’s shirt in the wedding scene and recoiled in horror. “He’s an officer in the marine corps! He should have his rank insignia on the collar. This film is a disgrace.”
When flappy paddle gearboxes appeared on the market, they were remarkable. There was no clutch pedal. You pulled a lever and, bang: You were in third. Amazing.
Not to us lot, it wasn’t. We were appalled. There was no “creep”, which you get from a car with a normal automatic gearbox, so it was impossible to parallel park on even the slightest incline. We were incandescent. This was a clever new thing, but because it had one tiny drawback – one pube in the soup – we hated it.
It was the same story with turbocharging. Here was a system that used waste exhaust gases to make the engine more powerful. Free speed? Brilliant.
You must be joking. It was the worst thing ever, because there was a gap between putting your foot down and the car accelerating. This was called turbo lag and it was worse than racism.
Carmakers worked around the clock to eliminate this lag. They fitted smaller, more responsive turbos and mounted them in the V of the engine to put them closer to the action. And they developed sequential turbocharging. And turbocharging that worked in tandem with supercharging. Eventually they got the “lag” down to a point where you simply would not notice it. But we knew it was there. And that wasn’t good enough; it wasn’t even on nodding terms with good enough. It was up there with that sentry in Ben Hur who was wearing a wristwatch.
And don’t get me started on panel gaps. Over the years we’d become used to the gap between, say, the bonnet and the front wing being maybe 5mm wide. But then along came Lexus, which produced a car with gaps so thin you couldn’t slide a piece of tracing paper in there. And that wasn’t good enough. “A millimetre,” we’d wail. “That’s basically a mile.” Everyone except Tesla is down now to an even-smaller gap, and we still joke about not having to open the door to get inside.
I like to think our constant ability to be unimpressed drove carmakers to strive for perfection, and about 10 years ago they achieved “peak car”. The turbo lag really had gone. The panel gaps were invisible. The electrics were tried and tested. And, for the most part, they’d given up on flappy paddle double-clutch gearboxes and gone back to traditional autos. Which had become smooth, seamless, fast and light.
And then along came the world’s net-zero Kumbaya governments that wanted cars to be uncrashable and produce fewer emissions than a single kale seed. Which meant carmakers had to abandon everything they’d learnt over the previous hundred years.
It’s not as if they’ve had to go back to a time when the controls were on the outside and there were running boards, but backwards they have most definitely gone. The electric and hybrid cars of today are probably about as good as proper cars were in 1986. And as a motoring journalist, that makes my teeth itch.
Which brings me to the snappily titled BMW X5 xDrive50e M Sport, which may tickle your interest gene if you don’t want a Volvo and have been told by an insurance broker that you cannot have a Range Rover any more.
Let me talk you through the headlines. It has a 3.0-litre, six-cylinder petrol engine that is extremely good. And then there’s an electric motor that is not interesting, in the same way that the electric motor in a juicer is not interesting. The battery is also not interesting, but it is quite big and can be charged using either the mains or the petrol engine.
On electric power alone it will cover maybe 80km, which is more than you get from any of its rivals. And if you use it in tandem with the proper engine you’ll achieve 12.75km/litre. Or 64km/litre. Or 8.5km/litre, depending on what’s doing the driving most of the time. And the barometric pressure. And whether it’s Tuesday on Jupiter.
Other things? Well, there’s four-wheel drive and air suspension, and the option of seven seats. Oh, and Hans Zimmer in the loudspeakers. When you accelerate or decelerate you hear a sound composed by Zimmer, who was responsible for the soundtracks on Gladiator and Interstellar and countless other movies. It’s not music as such; it’s like that background noise you get in a spa. All things considered, I prefer the howl of a V10. And then we get to the drive modes, which not only change the Zimmer noises but the look of the dash. Put it in “sport” and everything goes red, as though you’ve fallen into a volcano.
But the drive mode that fascinates me most is the “adaptive” option, which uses the sat-nav to read the road ahead and decides what setup the car should be using.
What’s extraordinary about all of this technology is that you can simply climb aboard, push the start button and set off. You’re using more computing power than the Chinese government but most people would say it feels like a car. Not me. Yes, the transition from electric motor to petrol engine is fairly seamless, but it’s there all right. And if you are changing down when the engines are busy doing quantum maths, you really can set the cat among the pigeons.
I’m not sure that any of this is relevant, though, because I’m applying Led Zep standards to Taylor Swift. People don’t want drum solos any more; they don’t want that heady mix of blues and heavy metal. The X5 xDrive50e M Sport will not be judged by the crispness of its turn-in or the immediacy of its responses, but on its connectivity and how much carbon dioxide it makes. So it will be judged to be extremely good and clever.
If you’re a fellow petrolhead, ignore cars like this and buy one from 10 years ago, when cars were not perfect, but they were pretty bloody close.
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BMW X5 xDrive50e M Sport
ENGINE: 3.0-litre, six-cylinder turbo petrol, plus electric motor
PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h 4.8 secs, top speed 249km/h
PRICE: $149,900
JEREMY’S RATING:
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