Verdict
It’s arguably the most exciting estate car there has ever been, and certainly the most potent. Yet at the same time the new BMW M5 Touring is a spacious and practical car, featuring a 500/1,630 litre boot. It also contains a tonne of innovative new tech. Plus, it does as much as 166mpg and emits just 39g/km of CO2. It’s hard to find anything about it to dislike.
It’s hard to think of a car that contains more ability under just one (carbon fibre) roof than the new BMW M5 Hybrid Touring – fast in a straight line, practical and spacious as an estate car, and chock-full of tech thanks to its new i5-influenced cabin.
Codenamed the G91, this is only the third time BMW has produced an estate version of the mighty M5, despite the G90 saloon on which it’s based being the seventh-gen M5. It weighs just 40kg more than the saloon, which seems impressive in isolation, until you realise that at 2,475kg it’s still a very heavy car, even compared with rivals such as the Audi RS 6 Avant, which weighs over 300kg less.
Yet, says BMW, the M5 Touring’s weighty hybrid powertrain gives it a depth of dynamic flexibility that no rival can get close to. Despite being a heavy plug-in hybrid, the M5 Touring is surprisingly green, and that makes it much cheaper to run as a company car; its official consumption figures of 166mpg and 39g/km mean its company car tax rates are far lower than any petrol competitors. In some markets, this brings major tax savings on the initial purchase price, so even though the Touring costs £113,405 in the UK, in Ireland, for example, it ends up costing almost £15k less than the M3 Touring because of the extra tax that’s applied to its smaller, purely petrol-powered cousin.
