BMW 8 Series Coupe 2019 Review

The pressure is on for even mainstream premium cars to go faster and faster, and the M850i xDrive Coupe is as fast as a non-M BMW has ever gone.

Bursting to 100km/h in 3.7 seconds is stupendously impressive, given the go-faster BMW M8 won’t be seen until March next year, but the four German premium brands are locked in a spiral of chasing speed with the top ends of their ranges.

Cars like the M850i Coupe spotlight some of the subconscious discomfort behind for the dawning of the EV era, with companies misusing their resources to deliver sports car speed from overweight machines when they could easily sacrifice some of that for the efficiency that could preserve their social legitimacy.

What’s also true, though, is that fans and buyers demand decreasing 0-100km/h times because it’s about the only benchmark they have. And because buyers want them to be faster so that’s how car-makers will deliver them.

Besides, BMW insists, any difference between a 3.9-second M850i and a 3.7-second one is all in the eight-speed transmission’s launching and shifting capabilities, not in using any extra fuel or burping out any extra emissions.

I’ve got to admit that I was a bit cynical about the M850i, until about five corners in to the Estoril racetrack near Lisbon.

Cars this big will rarely ever sidle up at track days, especially not when every hard-won apex takes hefty bites out of the tyre, fuel and brake budgets, but its grip levels and its ease of operation at the upper limits of its handling range can only safely be done on a closed circuit.

And they can only be done on a circuit because the limits are just so high, and so impressive. Yes, there is weight there aplenty. It’s always front and centre in every thought process from the start of the braking area until when you start picking up the throttle again.

But its weight without tardiness, and it changes direction with surprising enthusiasm, it hustles its power down onto the road with incredible success and it’s always stable, even when it’s completely beyond the lateral grip limits of its Pirelli rubber.

The odd part about the M850i is that it’s priced at about the same point as the Mercedes-Benz S550 Coupe, but it must have been designed with a completely different grand-touring driver in mind.

The Benz targets comfort and refinement, and delivers its handling from behind a genteel mask and an overwhelming feeling of unflappability.

The flagship BMW 8 Series Coupe doesn’t do that. It can do luxury, but it targets the handling and the hammering first and foremost, with comfort and, in particular, refinement coming in a clear second.

Oh, and there’s no space in the back for adults, teenagers or even little kids.

And for all BMW’s talk about modular engines based around 500cc cylinders, the V8 remains very much not like that at all. In the ideal BMW world, it would be a 4.0-litre V8, just like Audi’s, Mercedes-Benz’s and Porsche’s V8s.

It’s a 4.4-litre V8 because BMW says the Americans like a bigger capacity. The real reason is that its planned cycle time hasn’t finished yet, so it just keeps receiving updates.

The 4395cc motor is strong, everywhere, though it’s not a stratospherically high revver. (To be fair, nothing in the BMW line-up is a stratospherically high revver anymore.)

Instead, it gives you 750Nm of torque from 1800rpm, then holds it until 4600rpm, while its 390kW of power is stamping its authority at 5500rpm and holding on to that until 6000rpm.

And while the M850i’s V8 can spin a little higher, to 6500rpm, there’s not much reward to be extracted from it.

It’s a formidable engine, and it sounds and feels like a formidable one all the time. Yes, its Eco and Comfort modes include the engine in their remits, but all they really do is pull its lips back over its teeth.

There’s none of that in Sport or Sport Plus and the M850i barks and growls and snaps and crackles. There’s a slight, seemingly intentional coarseness to it at low revs to highlight its performance, with someone evidently thinking the king hit to the spine was too ambiguous.

It boasts of direct fuel-injection, a pair of bigger, hot vee-mounted, twin-scroll turbos, variable valve lift and timing and a flap-controlled, binary exhaust system that ranges from loud to loudest.

The last time we saw this V8 on a mainline BMW it had 50kW less power and 100 fewer Isaacs. BMW has paid attention to detail to get there, lifting the fuel-injection pressure from 200 to 350 bar, which helps with fuel metering and lowering the emissions.

Aaaaand about that. The M850i pushes out 9.8L/100km, which is just 0.1 litres fewer than the M5 did before they polished it up this time around, and it emits 224g/km of CO2. And that’s with two larger close-coupled catalytic converters and particulate filters. So it’s not brilliant.

A massive key to the M850i’s straight-line performance is its eight-speed automatic transmission. Other car-makers source their autos from ZF as well, but none seem to be able to deliver the snap and positive engagement of the BMW units.

And this is another example of that. The car’s engineering leader insisted they found between two and three tenths of a second to 100km/h shared between the launch control and the shifting performance of the magnificent eight-speeder.

The shifts might be precise when it’s attacking, but they’re positive, rather than shocking. It’s not bad when the car’s cruising, either, with a wider spread of gear ratios and the transmission is also lighter than it was in the 6 Series.

Technically, the M850i is an all-wheel drive car, but it’s really a rear-wheel drive car with an on-demand front differential. If the car’s cruising on a highway or dawdling around town, then it’s a rear-wheel drive car. Even when the all-wheel drive system kicks in, it still holds on to a rear-drive posture and feeling.

The M850i also carries rear-wheel steering and BMW’s electronically controlled rear diff lock as standard kit and all of its powertrain ideas work seamlessly together, rather than as separate units. The driver never feels one thing beginning and the other ending.

The only time you can really feel something moving independent of the other oily stuff is when you’re moving into a low-speed bend and the weight begins to force the nose away from your chosen line. Then the rear steer does its thing and the nose of the car suddenly tugs itself back where you wanted it to go. It’s uncanny and intuitive.

The M850i is another CLAR car, riding on the same architectural base as the 5 Series and the new Z4, so its chassis is a mix of high-strength steels, aluminium and carbon-fibre.

And somehow it still weighs in at 1965kg on the EU scale, or 1890kg dry.

It’s a technically sophisticated number, with a five-link rear-end and a double-wishbone front-end that separates its damping and steering functions and then it adds stuff like active anti-roll bars, integral active steering (err, rear-wheel steering) and active dampers.

The upshot is a car that does its very best to hide its weight, but it never does it with complete success until the rear-steering kicks in.

It stops all of this – with surprising success – via a set of 395mm front brake discs with four-piston callipers and it all rides on 245/40 R20 front tyres and 275/30 R20s at the rear.

The issue isn’t the car’s speed – it’s got plenty, topping out at 250km/h – but its refinement.

It handles better than it ought to, which has been the trick of the engineers, and it does it with precise steering (especially in its sport modes, where it adds weight and feedback) and remarkably calm chassis work.

It holds tremendous speed in long, fast bends, but also whips through tighter corners and direction changes in a way that is eyebrow-raising. It’s even happy in the wet, with the diff and all-wheel drive able to turn all that torque into all that punch, time and time again.

It will slide with the DSC skid control in its one-push setting, but only enough to be easily recoverable for even moderately skilled operators.

It also rides reasonably well over broken ground, but it’s a very big car, at 4851mm long and 1902mm wide, so it should.

Where the BMW M850i xDrive Coupe falls down against its Stuttgart rival is in refinement. The chassis or the intent doesn’t deliver it like the S-Class Coupe does.

There’s more engine noise, more wind noise and more road noise in the cabin, in every circumstance, and it never imparts the same sense of calm to its operators, even though its operating ceiling is higher.

Let’s start at the back seat: there isn’t one.

Well, there is one. It’s clearly there, with a sculpted bench behind the front seats that look for all the world to be seats.

Except you can’t sit in them. My daughter couldn’t sit in them (and I sit notoriously close to the wheel), and she’s about five. Headroom doesn’t exist, knee room doesn’t exist, shoulder room doesn’t exist and good luck keeping your toes.

So, unlike the moderately useful S-Class Coupe rear seats, the BMW M850i’s are more like the Porsche 911 rear seats, and their inability to house actual people hasn’t much hurt the 911 over the years.

They do fold down, though, with a 50:50 split and push-button folding allow people to add to the taking the boot’s 420-litre capacity.

The front seats are a pretty schmick place to be, though. They are trimmed nicely, they’re comfortable, with electric adjustment in every direction, and they fold over and slide forward at the pull of a strap to allow people out of the rear seats.

They have integral head restraints, too, which is both good and bad (some people can find that they rub their heads against them constantly), and they’re surrounded by a pair of cup-holders, large door pockets and a split-covered armrest that hides a pretty big console area.

The dash carries is a 12.3-inch fully digital instrument cluster paired to a 10.25-inch infotainment touch screen, and most of the interior’s functions are run by touching and swiping the smaller of the two screens.

The trouble is that some tasks that were one-touch are now three or five touches of the screen, leaving you with your eyes off the road for far longer than is ideal. There’s also a concern that the tech is outstripping some of the older sections of the buyer profile.

There’s a 16-speaker Harman Kardon surround sound system lurking beneath the surfacing of the cabin, though a 1375-Watt Bowers & Wilkins Diamond system sits upstream of that.

And if you’re going to go that far, you might as well take the optional glass gear-lever top, with an ‘8’ visible through it’s panelled surface.

How much does the BMW M850i xDrive Coupe cost?
Price: TBC
On sale: Mid-2019
Engine: 4.4-litre V8 twin-turbo petrol V8
Output: 390kW/750Nm
Transmission: eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Fuel: 9.7L/100km
CO2: 221g/km
Safety Rating: TBC