BMW X5 4.8i


Apparently, the new 4.8-litre V8 BMW X5 can hoof around the infamous Nürburgring Nordschleife in about 10 minutes. Brilliant. Just what we really need; another fast-attack SUV that's as socially aware as a 14-year-old ASBO-convicted burglar.

If you need space and a high driving position and you don't want an MPV box, then obviously testing the reality of your newest large four-wheel drive against the world's premier road-cum-racetrack is exactly where you need to be.

I say this not because I have a problem with sporty SUVs in particular, merely that to be forced to benchmark oneself in such an arbitrary manner spells disaster for nearly everyone. To make it that quick, the X5 employs more acronyms and specialist name tags than any other car currently on the market.

I'll just delve briefly into BMW's bumpf to give you a taste of what you can have on your X5 should you tick the relevant boxes: DSC (Dynamic Stability Control) which incorporates ABS-fettling, ASC (Automatic Stability Control), Trailer Stability Control, HDC (Hill Descent Control) and DBC (Dynamic Brake Control).

Then there's - more relevantly - DTC (Dynamic Traction Control), xDrive four-wheel drive, AdaptiveDrive, active bendy lights, Active Steering, Integrated Chassis Management, FlexRay data transfer... the list goes on. It's even got High Beam Assist for heaven's sake, which switches your high beams on and off for you.

It's all gone a bit techno-loco. To be honest, making a car like this fast around the Nordschleife has about as much relevance to the people actually buying it as drag racing does to knitting.

Those people don't care what all of these clever things do, or how they do it. They're more concerned with image, the propagation and projection of which, along with the correct golf-club membership, will assure them both personal and professional respect.

OK, so that's a bit of a cliché. But people are bothered about what an X5 says about them, and it says quite a lot now that it looks a whole dollop more aggressive, much bigger and not unlike an X3 that's undergone black market clinical trials for growth hormones.

The extra surfaces on the bonnet remind me somewhat suspiciously of stylised armour, and those new gaping-maw air intakes under the front bumper are getting to the point where they might well just gobble up anything in their way. So the SUV arms race collects yet another victim in its wake. Bigger is better, biggest is best. Welcome to Audi Q7 disease, gentlemen.

At least there's a bit of a reason for the supersizing of this latest generation; the extra 18.7cm of length and 6.1cm of width make room for the addition of a fold-out third row of seats and more space inside. Now I know of at least two BMW saloon owners who, when faced with two kids, jumped straight at the Discovery 3.
Why? Well, kids have stuff and lots of friends, so the extra seats come in handy. You can shuttle four in comfort and have a decent boot; or shoehorn in a couple of extra passengers when used as taxi or school-run tool.

Up to now, you only got the X5 in a party-limiting five-seater, which doesn't feel as flexible as an XC90 or Disco when it comes to ferrying people as well as stuff. You can still get the five-seat version, as the extra seats are a £1,000 option at present, and the flat-folding, forward-facing seats are replaced by a very useful covered underfloor storage cavern if you don't need the extra pews. Runflats across the range (a first for a car of this size) mean there's no need for a spare.

Inside, the new X5 also has appreciably more space. I couldn't recommend that anyone over 5ft 6in uses the rearmost seats for long, but BMW makes no attempt to disguise the fact that these jump seats were designed for children, with the aid of children. The rear shoulderline has been dropped to give a better view and there are grabhandles in convenient places for small hands to haul themselves through the narrowish entry gap.

The seats themselves are easy to stow and equally easy to pop into action, and at least there's none of the annoying leaving-things-in-the-garage you sometimes get if you need the boot to carry something bigger than a briefcase.

Not much else feels significantly different, though plenty has changed. Most instantly noticeable is the new gear lever, which despite its odd kind of twisted-rectangle appearance is quite simply the best piece of functional design I've seen this year. Now there's a little piece of surprise and delight. It works well because you don't need to read the manual. Unlike most of the rest of the car, which will require an HND in BMW electronics-speak.

The X5 is also full of not-so-blatant surprises. BMW is very keen on keeping weight down and there's been plenty of use of lightweight materials in suspension and body to keep the kerbweight for most engine derivatives remarkably similar to the outgoing model: good for both handling and efficiency.

Clever stuff like cast-aluminium spring supports lop 50 per cent off the weight of the previous X5's steel structures, and there's even a super-lightweight aluminium bonnet, which I customised most effectively when shutting by leaving a pair of palm-shaped dents in it. Oops.

But there's no doubt that all of that calorie counting helps this barge be damnably quick. The donkey doing the work under this bonnet is the 355bhp, 350lb ft 4.8-litre V8, and it feels sprightly as long as you don't rev it too hard, at which point it starts to strain a bit.

It didn't help that the X5's new six-speed auto also felt slightly recalcitrant when pressing on through full-throttle up-changes. This new 'box (standard on all X5s) is supposed to be some 50 per cent faster than before, with a new direct connection to the engine to encourage a sportier feeling, but it can hang onto gears a bit too long.

Strange, because the shift is now 'by-wire' instead of mechanical and new torque-converter technology cuts down on transmission slip and its resulting inefficiencies (good for an extra three per cent mpg on the combined cycle), so you get more power and, ultimately, a more responsive throttle pedal.

Luckily, you can either change up yourself, which mitigates the standard auto's laggardly shifting in the upper reaches, or simply press the little 'Sport' button just behind the gear lever which tidies things up nicely. In normal auto mode, the 4.8-litre X5 'box is much happier slobbing about on an appreciable torque/noise sweet-spot.

Still, imagine you're in a rush to get somewhere; the degree to which the X5 manages to disguise its sheer bulk is a triumph of computer programming over physics, a testament to the fact that if you throw enough capacity and inventiveness at something, even something as physically unsuited to spirited driving as a large SUV, you can make a passable impression of a rocket-propelled pimp chariot. And, boy, does this thing go fast.

Part of the new X5's ability to go in search of the outer edges of the performance-car envelope are indeed down to electronics, and their ability to interact with one another via a new data transfer system called FlexRay.

FlexRay replaces the more common CAN-bussing systems available in most current cars and makes data transfer a zillion times quicker. BMW reckons that this method of information flow allows them to come up with what they're calling AdaptiveDrive - a new way of making the X5 go faster, even if it shouldn't really.

What AdaptiveDrive means is that relevant bits of the car can talk to each other more effectively, more of the time. So you get a co-ordinated interaction between anti-roll bars and dampers - but it's so much more than that.

AdaptiveDrive monitors the speed, longitudinal and lateral acceleration and steering angle, as well as ride height of the X5, adjusting the sway motors in the anti-roll bars and the electromagnetic valves in the dampers to keep the big thing straight and level on the road.

Currently, it doesn't make a decent cup of tea. That will possibly be an option in the near future, but BMW is being cagey at this point.

You also get a four-wheel-drive system (xDrive) that can speak to the traction control system, ABS and the engine management to make lightning-quick adjustments to torque and power where most appropriate. Drive can be shifted wholly rearwards (in normal situations the power is split 40:60 front to rear), or totally forwards, or side to side, all within fractions of a second.

You have an active steering system - which makes infinitely more sense on something as large as an X5 - that applies opposite lock itself should the car's yaw sensor yell out. You have all of these talking to that anti-lean software on those active dampers.

In another fit of marketable name-tagging, BMW refers to this as 'Integrated Chassis Management'. You have a car that eschews the merely ordinary for a kind of eerie technological theatre of operation. It's bloody strange, to be honest.

There's not even a sense that you can feel the elements working, so seamless and quick is the witchcraft. On the road, the X5 has marginal understeer and a whole load of general day-to-day grip. To push willfully past the generous limits should bring absolute disaster because you'll be travelling horrendously quickly atop two-and-a-bit tonnes of car with normal (albeit huge) road tyres. But it doesn't.

The brakes, even when stomped on most ungraciously halfway round a corner stutter slightly under your foot, but bring the X5 to as serene a halt as you've ever seen. You won't be surprised to hear that CBC (Corner Brake Control) is involved with the ABS, meaning that if all four wheels are sliding and one manages to find some grip, the X5 can slow itself down using just the one rim.

It also compensates for brake fade by applying more braking force as the temperatures get higher - no matter what you're doing in the cabin - and will gently apply the brakes in the wet to keep them dry.

Torque will even be apportioned specifically between front and rear axles to counteract both over and understeer so that the X5 doesn't wander off line, as well as that Active Steering applying opposite lock.

Say, for example, you come in too hot and the car starts to understeer, the xDrive system will punt almost 100 per cent of power backwards, curing the problem. The same can happen in an oversteer situation, shoving power to the front axle and balancing the car without steering input.

Even on gravel roads, with too much throttle, mid-corner braking and sawing at the wheel like a joyrider, the X5 just understeers a bit and goes where you point it. I even initiated what should have been crash-worthy oversteer by approaching a bend on a private gravel road at twice the speed recommended, braking late and giving a left-right-left on the wheel.

I shut my eyes and went for it, photographer Bramley jumped out of the way faster than I've ever seen him move. The X5 corrected most of the slide on its own. This car is awesomely clever.

The thing with the new X5 is that although it looks very big, it just doesn't drive like it. It should be super-comfy, but it rides like a sports car. Taking its lead from an extremely well-sorted new double-wishbone front axle arrangement, it doesn't seem to wallow, or lean, or squeal like it should considering its visual c-of-g, and it doesn't have any problem tearing up twisty lanes like some kind of freakishly fast land yacht. But it feels fake.

Even though it does it all with enormous aplomb, it's not really a car that you enjoy driving. You may respect it as a machine; but it's not emotive. Which, I suspect, is exactly what 99.5 per cent of those who buy an X5 really want; a tank version of a 3-, 5- or 7-Series.

Forty one per cent of X5s (which are built at BM's Spartanberg, USA, plant) will be sold in America. That might explain the upscaling, because in the US, size really isn't so much of an issue. But the new X5 is another car that's rewriting the rule book for all the wrong reasons. It might be brilliant, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

Tom Ford

Source: http://www.topgear.com/drives/A4/D3/...sts/07/01.html