Drive Notes: 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive

by Tim Healey

Published: April 1st, 2024

I tested a 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive last week, and I have thoughts.

Hit the jump for more.

The all-electric i5 is not cheap, starting at $84,100 and checking out at $93,495 as-tested. It's luxurious, fast, and has a distressingly low range. Read on.

Pros

It's quick. Yes, yes, most EVs feel quick thanks to instant torque. But this one has 593 horsepower and 586 lb-ft of torque and you feel it when you need to pass or merge.
The "Iconic Sounds" system seems to provide both a fake-exhaust sound and some sort of spaceship-like sounds, depending on drive mode, when you tromp hard on the accelerator. We've mostly been skeptical of this sort of thing here at TTAC, but it actually sounded kind of cool.
I like the boost paddle that gives you a bit more oomph for a few seconds.
BMW got the ride/handling mix right on this one.
The large infotainment screen extending out from the instrument cluster looks good.
Interior comfort is nice and the materials are price appropriate.
Highway cruising is quite comfy.

Cons

The range was only about 150 miles at 78 percent of capacity when I picked the car up, and charging on an old-school outlet is slooooow. I didn't have the chance to fast charge.
The shifter has no "Park" function, you either shut the system down or set the parking brake. This is annoying and I nearly had the car roll on me a couple of times.
Similarly, sometimes I shut the system off, but the radio was still playing, at least until I locked the doors. I've seen this on other Bimmers, and it remains confusing.
I couldn't figure out the name for the voice assistant, and clicking on it via the infotainment system and asking for its name went nowhere.
There's no front trunk, and therefore, no corresponding increase in storage space.
The price feels $20K too high.

We'll be back later this week with some scattered thoughts on the new Nissan Versa.

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Tim Healey

Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.

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2 of 34 comments

MaintenanceCosts on Apr 02, 2024

The iX is a styling disaster, but this one is tolerable to me. But at this size and price, I'd rather go taller and have a CUV. It's not like a three-ton sedan is going to have much of a driving quality advantage.

1 Reply
Dana on Apr 13, 2024

You don’t need park, you set auto hold (button on the console). Every BMW answers to ‘Hey, BMW’, but you can set your own personal wake word in iDrive. It takes less than 5 minutes to figure that that out, btw. The audio stays on which is handy for Teams meetings. Once your phone is out of range, the audio is stopped on the car. You can always press down on the audio volume wheel which will mute it, if it bothers you. I found all the controls very intuitive.

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GregLocock They will unless you don't let them. Every car manufacturing country around the world protects their local manufacturers by a mixture of legal and quasi legal measures. The exception was Australia which used to be able to design and manufacture every component in a car (slight exaggeration) and did so for many years protected by local design rules and enormous tariffs. In a fit of ideological purity the tariffs were removed and the industry went down the plughole, as predicted. This was followed by the precision machine shops who made the tooling, and then the aircraft maintenance business went because the machine shops were closed. Also of course many of the other suppliers closed.The Chinese have the following advantagesSlave laborCheap electricityZero respect for IPLong term planning
MaintenanceCosts Yes, and our response is making it worse.In the rest of the world, all legacy brands are soon going to be what Volvo is today: a friendly Western name on products built more cheaply in China or in companies that are competing with China from the bottom on the cost side (Vietnam, India, etc.) This is already more or less the case in the Chinese market, will soon be the case in other Asian markets, and is eventually coming to the EU market.We are going to try to resist in the US market with politicians' crack - that is, tariffs. Economists don't really disagree on tariffs anymore. Their effect is to depress overall economic activity while sharply raising consumer prices in the tariff-imposing jurisdiction.The effect will be that we will mostly drive U.S.-built cars, but they will be inferior to those built in the rest of the world and will cost 3x-4x as much. Are you ready for your BMW X5 to be three versions old and cost $200k? Because on the current path that is what's coming. It may be overpriced crap that can't be sold in any other world market, but, hey, it was built in South Carolina.The right way to resist would be to try to form our own alliances with the low-cost producers, in which we open our markets to them while requiring adherence to basic labor and environmental standards. But Uncle Joe isn't quite ready to sign that kind of trade agreement, while the orange guy just wants to tell those countries to GFY and hitch up with China if they want a friend.
CEastwood Thy won't get recruits who want to become police officers . They'll get nuts who want to become The Green Hornet .
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