I got an X5 4.8 for the wife last year, sport with the 20s and she loves it. I wanted to get her an X6 but she felt the extra cargo space was needed.

As many of you may know, despite using the same chassis, same wheel size and wheelbase and being roughly the same weight, the X6 5.0 is in another league all together from the E70 X5 4.8 in terms of driving dynamics. The low end turbo-torque makes the X6 seem so much lighter and more nimble and the trick rear diff. helps what is already excellent handling. Well, now the X5 is going to have all that and an 8 speed transmission too. My prediction is that the 2011 X5 id s going to be miles ahead of the 4.8 in every respect (which will probably not be obvious to non car people since BMW is changing very little of the bodywork with the update).

But the point of this post is that it will now be a fair fight between a $75-80k Cayenne GTS and a $75k X5 5.0. What I mean by fair is that even Ray Charles would be able to see how superior the X5 will be in every...every category. Whereas the GTS sounds better than the current 4.8, has better wheels and a more aggressive stance, it's 369 ft. lbs. of torque vs. the 4.8's 350 gives it next to no advantage in acceleration. But this doesn't seem apparent to most people, who are simply fixated on the hood emblem and exhaust note. (Like my friend who tried to race our other friend's X6 5.0 with his dad's GTS and got sa-moked!) The X5M is as fast as the Cayenne Turbo S, and now the base X5 5.0 will be as fast as the Cayenne Turbo. My money says Porsche moves the GTS package up a notch shortly... I've heard that the next Cayenne will loose its off road bits to shed weight to compete. If so, that would put the ball in Porsche's court... But in the mean time I can't wait to read the magazine comparisons/shootouts with the new X5 5.0 in the near future.

DRP