Top Gear reviews new M5

DoggieHowser

DoggieHowser

Well-Known Member
Just watched the Sunday episode (UK edition).

The highlight has possibly got to be the M5. Quite funny cos Jeremy spends the first half of the review criticising the car. He obviously didn' like the 5 series look and he didn't like that the M5 badging is a lot less subtle than with earlier versions.

He complained about how he has to take like an hour to fine tune the car. The M5 has like a zillion settings for how you want the SMG gearshift to respond, throttle response, 3 settings for traction control, suspension settings etc etc even before you get to iDrive.

And then when it started up.. he complained it was like a bloody diesel engine.

He didn't like the jerky gear changes when pottering about town.. despite fiddling with the different control settings for the SMG, he couldn't find one that he liked.

And he didn't like how the turn indicators didn't have a neutral position. If you flicked it left, you have to wait for it to turn it off automatically :p try flicking it right, and the right indicator would come up. Is this the same wif the other models in the 5 series here??

And he also hated the radio controls.. he felt the steering mounted controls were not intuitive.

And the one feature that he possibly hated the most of all was the SatNav voice guidance system. He just could not get the German accented English female voice to shut up.. If there was an option to disable it, he couldn't find it. Even in STIG's hotlap, the damn voice was telling STIG when to turn...

Every time he'd say something about the car in his review, the Sat Nav woman would keep interrupting him!! Damn hilarious

And then he pushed the M button.. and suddenly everything changed.

All those settings you had for suspension/steering/throttle/SMG etc.. now gets over-ridden by the default M settings, and of course, you get the infamous extra 107 bhp. Heads Up Display pops up. Engine sounded incredible.. and I loved the sound when he kept revving it to redline over and over and over again.

Jeremy called it a bargain :) engine more powerful than the F430.. sounds as good and handles as well.. and cheaper than the F430.. at almost half price.

Downsides: there's already a 2 year waitlist for the M5 in the UK, and after Jeremy had some fun with it, the differential broke and the car had to be trailered back to BMW. After the STIG's hot lap.. Engine warning showed Diff failure too.
 
Re: Top Gear reviews new M5

From his review ...

BMW M5
By Jeremy Clarkson of The Sunday Times
For a rat up the trousers, press M


The M5, however, has always been a little bit different. The best was the first. Launched in the late 1980s it looked exactly like my dad’s dreary 525e, but thanks to its 286bhp straight-six engine it went with a ferocity and a panache that had no place in a four-door saloon.

It was, quite simply, the best Q car ever made (it looks ordinary but goes like a rat up your trousers).

That said, the M5s that followed were fairly stupendous as well. Quiet, unassuming cars for people who wanted to get home very quickly without making a song and dance about it. And here’s the clincher. These cars lost money like gin palaces, halving in value overnight and then halving again before breakfast was over.



The first M5, launched in the late 1980s was, quite simply, the best Q car ever made (it looks ordinary but goes like a rat up your trousers)
Jeremy Clarkson


So whenever I see someone in an M5 I’m overcome with a wave of respect, because here is someone who has paid a fortune to hide his light under a bushel. I like that, and as a result I was desperately looking forward to my first go in the new model.

It has a 5 litre V10 engine that churns out 400bhp. It’ll do 0-60 in 4sec and could, if it didn’t have an electronic Bill Oddie under the bonnet, hit 204mph. And yet, apart from a few fancy air ducts on the front it looks pretty much identical to your doctor’s normal 5-series. Sounds like quite a recipe.

Unfortunately, however, the recipe has been spoilt somewhat by someone who thinks pure engineering can be improved with a blizzard of technobabble.

So before setting off for a 50-mile journey home on a lovely summer’s evening, I had to choose from 11 different settings on the seven-speed flappy paddle gearbox. Then I had to decide how ferocious I wanted the gearshifts to be, very fierce, quite fierce, moderately fierce, boring or very boring. And then I had to choose from three settings on the electronic differential.

And then, since I didn’t know where I was, I had to set the sat nav, which meant hitting a knob, twiddling it, moving it to the side and then twiddling it again.

It’s a good job this car has so much power because by the time you’ve set it up for the journey that lies ahead you’re already very late.

Anyway, off I toddled, cursing the BMW gearbox’s inability to cope with town traffic no matter what setting you choose. Pretty soon, however, the road opened up, Bob Seger came on the radio, and with a determined shove I put my foot down.

And pushed a knob on the steering wheel that I assumed controlled the volume. It didn’t. It changed the station, so now instead of Hollywood Nights I had some fat opera bint warbling on Radio 3. Damn. So I had to get the screen out of sat nav mode into entertainment mode and then tell it I wanted an FM station, whereupon it presented me with a million local alternatives that nobody who has £61,000 to spend on a car would ever listen to. I just want one button for Radio 2 and one for Radio 4. And that’s it.

Eventually I relocated Bob Seger but unfortunately I was approaching a roundabout and the sat nav woman had decided I was an idiot. So she told me to go straight over and then repeated herself and then repeated it again. And by the time she’d shut up Bob had been replaced with a miserable sounding girl called Dildo.

Happily, by this stage I knew where I was so I thought, “Okay, I’ll turn the sat nav off.” Well you can’t. It doesn’t matter what button you press, she continues to give her instructions over and over again until you want to bludgeon her and her family to death with an axe. Even if you pull over and turn off the engine, she lies in a state of suspended animation, waiting to spew electronic diarrhoea all over the cockpit when you set off again.

To make matters worse, in the desperate search for the right button I’d hit something called “power”, which had ruined the ride. And then I’d made the mistake of reaching for the indicator. You can’t turn that off either. It doesn’t matter what you do with the stalk, it just goes on blinking until it’s decided you’ve made the turn.

By this stage I was properly angry and now the sat nav cow was not only giving me audible instructions but flashing them onto a head-up display on the windscreen. And the indicator was still on and I couldn’t find Radio 4. And then I hit another button on the steering wheel called “M”.

This brought up a rev counter in the head-up display and caused the seat to start attacking my back. I’m not joking. Every time I went round a corner some electronic chip decided I needed more support and firmed up the appropriate bolster.

They say a Dutch bargee can swear for two minutes without repetition or hesitation. But in the new M5 I beat that easily. Why, I wailed to myself, can there not just be one big red button in the middle of the steering wheel which turns all this crap off? Why do I have to live in some German geek’s wet dream? And then to improve my mood still further, I came up behind a Rover that was being driven by someone who was a hundred and seventy twelve. In a temper I put my foot down to get past and couldn’t believe what happened.

It seems that the M button, in addition to electrifying the seat, had told a computer deep in the bowels of the engine that I was in the mood for some fun and games. So now the V10 was no longer developing 400bhp. It was handing over a massive 507. That’s right, 507. And as a result the M5 just flew.

In the last five miles of my journey I discovered that deep beneath the layers of utter and complete electronic nonsense, and the rather ugly body, there’s one truly amazing car.

Just when I was thinking that BMW had made yet another car for yet another software consultant, it did something I really wasn’t expecting.

It became a full-on M5. And praise doesn’t come higher than that.

Vital statistics

Model BMW M5
Engine Ten cylinders, 4999cc
Power 507bhp @ 7750rpm
Torque 383 lb ft @ 6100rpm
Transmission Seven-speed manual
Fuel 19.1mpg (combined)
CO2 357g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 4.7sec
Top speed 204mph
Price £61,760
Verdict The consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing
Rating 4/5
 
Re: Top Gear reviews new M5

Thanks, for the info guys. Looking forward to catching it soon.
 
Re: Top Gear reviews new M5

Hi guys, alternatively, you can also check out www.isohunt.com. Run a search on "top gear" and you will be able to find the older episodes even, if you are lucky. The latest episodes are available abuot 12hours after it's aired in UK.

Cheers!
 
Re: Top Gear reviews new M5

Hahaha! the review was absolutely hilarious...
 
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