BMW 650i 2015 Review

Ford once had a television commercial for its Falcon Ute with the tagline “Don’t Look No Different”. Then it went on to show all the things it could do — because it was upgraded substantially beneath the skin — that the old one couldn’t.

BMW might well have a quick look at this ad, because even its designers admit you’d need to be looking very, very closely at it on the road to know it was a new model.

The justification, BMW said, was that the 650i “continues to be the benchmark for grand tourers in its class” and there was no reason to mess with that.

Yet that class continues to get smaller and now BMW is, effectively, the only player in it. Neither traditional German foe has a player here (the Audi A5 is smaller and will retire this year; Benz has a C-Class coupe and an S-Class coupe, but nothing in between), which means you have to scratch around a bit to find rivals.

There is Jaguar’s XK, but Maserati’s wonderful, sumptuous GranTurismo is in its final year and anything from Bentley is at least one class up in price.

“The benchmark for grand tourers in its class”, then, is probably a very accurate comment.

Still, BMW has shifted 85,000 6 Series models since its March, 2011 global launch, but fully half of them today are the four-door GranCoupe version. About the only place left that the two-door coupe is the favourite 6 Series is Russia (and who’d want that to be your main luxury buyer these days?).

“We made some fine adjustments,” admitted BMW’s vice-president of management for the Grand Series, Timo Resch.

“It was true that we already had some very great design so we only had to do some very minor things to increase the sportiness and the luxury.”

Like?

“There are fewer kidney bars and new wheels and mirrors.”

Moderately different to look at, then, and good luck identifying your neighbour’s new one when he shows up expecting a pat on the back.

Fortunately, there’s a bit more under the skin. There have been tickles to the steering and the chassis tuning and the 650i now gets a sports exhaust as standard equipment. So the loudness is built in.

“We adjusted the chassis and made the steering feel more intimate so that it finally delivers the dynamics promised by the look,” Resch admitted.

The steering is now an active system that adjusts the angle of the wheels to suit what you really want (or what it thinks you really want).

Aside from that, its chassis gets an active anti-roll system that hooks in to its adaptive drive set-ups (you know, EcoPro, Comfort, Sport and Sport+) and a get-loud flap in the exhaust.

There are other new bits and pieces, too, with the highlight probably being the adoption of full LED headlights (and adaptive versions as an option) and a full colour head-up display.

The 650i also treads down BMW’s familiar path of offering slightly different packages to people looking for slightly different things, so there’s the Design Pure Experience version, the Design Pure Excellence (luxury) and the M Sport package, plus you can go to Individual and spend until you like how the car looks and feels.

But these things usually boil down to how the car looks and goes, as well as how nice a thing it is to live with.

And the 650i goes pretty darn well.

There’s something incredibly throwback charming about a big grand touring coupe, with a combination of 330kW of power, a thumping V8 soundtrack and sophisticated handling. And that’s what the 650i delivers.

It is quiet when you want it to be, loud when you want to get excited, fast when you need it to be (especially in quicker bends) and it even rides nicely.

Whatever else they’ve done, the 4.4-litre V8 is the heart and, very much, the soul of the 650i. And it’s unchanged.

The mill combines a pair of twin-scroll turbochargers with direct fuel-injection and variable valve timing and lift to surge out 650Nm of torque at 2000rpm through to 4000rpm, and its 330kW power peak hits at 5500rpm. Exactly the same set of numbers the old one had at the end (it had grown from 300kW when it launched back in 2011, though).

It’s got the same consumption figure, too, with 8.9L/100km for the NEDC combined cycle, and the same 4.6-second burst to 100km/h, with just the rear wheels clawing at the tarmac.

It’s just that it’s louder now, but only when you want it to be. Which is almost all the time, even when you’re cruising.

A lovely engine, you could argue it didn’t need changing, yet if you’ve already pumped one through the lease cycle, you might want something fresher. Or you could just be happy enough to have another one.

It’s such a good powerplant that, to be frank, it stops you thinking about numbers and keeps you thinking about how you feel every time you ask it to do something. And you feel good.

It has a deep, smooth start up, a silken warble when you move off at part throttle, a snarling bark on the upshifts in Sport+ and everything in between. It doesn’t sound like two turbos are muffling it at all. It sounds like a well-trained animal, but an animal that still knows how to bite and bark. You know, like the Phantom’s Devil.

The eight-speed automatic is still ultra slick and fast, and it packs a crack on the Sport and Sport+ upshifts. It’s well adjusted to do its own shifting when you’re pressing on, but it’s happy enough for you do pull the paddles yourself. And it has launch control.

If you’re in EcoPro or Comfort mode, though, just leave it to its own devices. The engine has enough torque to do any job and the shifts are silken.

The big step up, though, is in the chassis. Where the old 650i felt a lot like a 5 Series sedan from the driver’s seat, the new one is composed, organised and even a bit of fun.

The chassis balance is terrific and even though the roads we had in Portugal were typically very slippery, the car showed no signs of getting upset, even with all of its skid-control software neutered.

The new adaptive steering and active anti-roll work in tandem to lift the 650i out of sleek-limo competence and up to enjoyment, with steering system adjusting the angle of both the front and rear wheels.

It’s speed dependent and it’s accurate and you don’t ever even think about it. It just points the nose where you want it to go and, the faster you go, the less angle you have to put into it. It’s fast and accurate with corrections, too.

It helps that the car corners beautifully flat, though that’s not to say it won’t get out of shape. It actually feels more integrated with every slip-control setup switched off, because it’s like the car rewards you for having confidence in its abilities by being ridiculously easy to manage at and beyond its limits.

Even with the Sport+ mode, the car’s most aggressive, it still allows some level of slip but has a slightly retarding pause between slide catching and momentum regathering.

But, all in all, it’s a worthwhile dynamic step up.
Like its engine, the 650i largely unchanged in size, too. There has been some fiddling around the kidney grille (they’ve taken one of the 10 vertical bars away) to add some three-dimensional texture, but not a scrap of metal has been altered.

To be fair, the front apron’s lower air intake is larger and wider than before, too, and the front foglights are now LED as well.

So it’s still 106mm shy of five metres long and it still rides on a 2855mm wheelbase and it’s still 1845kg. Which is a lot for a two-door car. For all its talk of light-weight design derived from the i8 program, the 650i is more than 100kg heavier than the old body-style 650i. You don’t get that for free.

The cockpit of the 6 Series was always the most heavily style-oriented (and driver-oriented) in the entire BMW line-up and that hasn’t changed. Its architecture is unaltered, but there is now a full colour head-up display, some classier black paneling around the dash clusters and centre console and a higher quality of leather trim.

ConnectedDrive internet navigation is standard across the range (at least, it is in Europe), along with dual-zone climate-control, heated electric seats up front and a leather steering wheel full of buttons and electrically adjustable for height and reach.