BMW i5 M60 Touring 2024 Review – International

The 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring is the flagship of the new 5 Series Touring range that has been huge in Europe for 33 years now, and this is the first one to be offered as an EV as well as a combustion-powered machine.

But while Europeans have a choice of 2.0-litre and 3.0-litre turbo-diesels, a plug-in hybrid and three EV options, we will only get the Big Boy, which will arrive here in the third quarter of this year priced from $219,900 plus on-road costs.

That gives the BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring a $4000 step up from its three-box sedan brother, while toting all of its equipment levels.

That $4K mark-up would have put an i5 eDrive40 Touring (with 250kW/400Nm and 560km of range) somewhere around $160,000. It’s a pity it’s not coming, because it’s a better all-round car than the M60.

While Europe took 95 per cent of the last-generation 5 Series Touring sales, other significant markets included (in order) Japan, Thailand and (...checks notes) Australia, and the long-roof version had, astonishingly, an average buyer age four years younger (at 53) than the sedan.

A three-quarter replica of its three-box sibling, the 2024 BMW i5 M60 XDrive Touring comes with all its fruit, plus a new perspective, inside and out, aft of the C-pillar.

It fits in the same space as the sedan, with a 5020mm overall length (up 97mm on the old Touring), 1900mm width (+32mm), 1515mm height (+17mm) and 2995mm wheelbase (+20mm), but leaves a considerably deeper footprint, with its 2350kg weight, up around 50kg.

Up front there are adaptive LED headlights, and while the stock alloys are 20 inches, there is a no-cost switch available for a 21-inch set (our test car ran the smaller option).

Other locked-in gear includes the enormous fixed glass roof, carbon-fibre trim details (if they’re here to save weight, they’re not working), the ridiculously glaring CraftedClarity Glass switchgear (narrator: it’s plastic), heated and cooled front seats, a four-zone heat-pump climate-control system, wireless phone charging, a 17-speaker Bowers and Wilkins sound system with 655W of grunt, merino leather upholstery and BMW’s Live Cockpit Professional set-up, matched to its OS8.5 operating system.

There is just one non-metallic paint code, but nine metallic paint codes (including Cape York Green) in the up-front price, while the three entry-level optional paint finishes are $2400 more, and Frozen Pure Grey and Frozen Deep Grey are $5000 each.

A Comfort Package brings a heated steering wheel, rear sun blinds, front comfort seats and rear seat heating for $2700, while the M Sport Plus kit, with some M-ish trim bits and 21-inch BMW Individual black aero wheels adds $3000.

The M60 tugs 2000kg along, and its quoted 610kg payload means it would take a fully laden entry car up to 2960kg. Eeek.

It runs BMW’s standard five-year factory warranty, which will run out at the same time as the included Chargefox subscription that comes with it.

While the 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring hasn’t been officially crash-tested yet, the sedan version is identical from the C-pillar forward, and it has a five-star ANCAP safety rating – ranking between 80 and 90 per cent on all four assessment scores.

The driver aids include front and rear autonomous emergency braking (AEB), Level 2+ adaptive cruise control (though BMW recently launched its Level 3 everything-off system in the 7 Series in Germany), a lane keeping system that is unusually well trained, front and rear cross traffic alerts and speed limit monitoring.

There are front, front-side, front-centre and rear head airbags, and what seems like a gazillion parking aids, including the ability to remember how to get in and out of tricky parking spots even if you’re standing outside the car driving it on an app.

There are also three top-tether strap points for child seats, and two ISOFIX mounts in the rear seat.

One of BMW’s favourite party tricks for the 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring is its ability to drive and park by itself, with the occupants standing outside the car, for up to 200 metres, which is handy when a space is narrow or the pathway is tricky to reverse out of.

It even features in-car gaming for when you’re stationary or the kids are bored, and there’s an 8-megapixel camera in the safety sensor suite, and it pairs its work with a long-range (300m) radar, joining an array of 40 driver assistance systems.

The i5 M60 xDrive Touring falls within the purview of BMW’s M Performance division, so they climbed into the goodies box to give it adaptive M dampers, active roll stabilisation, rear air suspension, M Sport brakes and integral active steering.

BMW Australia has leapfrogged every other powertrain option and decided upon only the 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring, which brings with it many, many go tickets.

While there’s still only a single-speed transmission, the M60 combines a 192kW/365Nm current-excited electric motor up front and a 250kW/430Nm version at the back, giving a system output of 380kW (though it can overboost to 442kW, which is the figure BMW is claiming as the maximum) and a very strong 795Nm of torque.

That’s enough to whump it to 100km/h in 3.9 seconds and on to a limited 230km/h top speed.

The 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring has a WLTP range of up to 506km from its 81.2kWh (or 84kWh gross) lithium-ion battery, which is 54km shy of its eDrive40 little brother with the same battery solution, and 10km short of the sedan version.

It can DC charge at up to 205kW, giving the M60 142km out of a 10-minute burst, while recharging from 10-80 per cent takes 30 minutes.

Three-phase AC charging at 11kW will take both variants from zero to fully charged in 8.5 hours.

The battery pack can anticipate charging station visits and preconditions itself to take big gulps of electrons.

There’s also a Max Range feature, which adds 25 per cent to the normal range of the i5 by switching off the creature comforts and limiting the top speed to 90km/h.

Not for everyday use, obviously, but probably welcome in a pinch.

The 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive is the star of the i5 Touring show for its raw speed and thumping punch in a civilised package, and rightly so. (That doesn’t mean the gentler eDrive40 isn’t the better car, though.)

It blasts its way to 100km/h in 3.9 seconds, and has its top speed reined in at 230km/h, but it’s also plenty flexible in everyday driving and it would be a rare day that anybody would need the overboost function to call on all the electrons in one hit.

It just never feels necessary. You take one or two big bursts of acceleration, to check that it can do what BMW says it can do, then you park about 60 per cent of its performance capacity in your back pocket, because it’s not useful most of the time.

Unlike the little brother, there is a standout feature of the M60, and it’s the powertrain. It’s always the powertrain, and because it punches so hard in an instant response to any urgent request for acceleration, even at rolling speed, there’s an actual need to warn passengers to brace their necks.

It will snap, hard, on acceleration to the point where heads get slammed into head restraints hard enough for a rugby referee to demand a concussion check.

Where the little bro is calming, competent and charming all at once, the M60 always feels like it’s smiling at you, being compliant and tapping a very heavy bat in one hand at the same time.

That said, the rest of the car does everything you want of it, and more.

It isolates the cabin from anything unwanted and remains entertaining when the wont arises, and even the multimedia system is relatively intuitive to operate (though it still won’t default back to, say, the navigation after you change the driving mode).

Even its sports seats are immensely comfortable, though it has yet another too-fat BMW steering wheel rim and the handling is always reliably precise, solidly anchored and surprisingly fleetfooted, given the heft.

And the all-important luggage area is broad, simple to access even when you want the seats folded flat, and immensely flexible.

It’s a sumptuous place to be, the interior of a 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring, and it carries that M7-Lite feeling over from the sedan.

Instead, the big difference is behind the rear seats, where BMW gave its EV, PHEV and combustion powertrains the same flat floor, the same 570 litres of standard luggage space and the same 1700 litres with the rear seats dropped flat.

The 40/20/40 split-fold rear seats can also be remotely operated from the luggage area, while the top-hinged tailgate reveals a low loading lip, and it has a wider luggage area than before.

There are storage compartments beneath the boot floor, too, and they hold a partition net and a flexible luggage compartment cover, along with the charging cables.

Up front, there are heated and ventilated sports seats, a new flat-bottomed steering wheel and a combination of a 12.3-inch instrument cluster and a 14.9-inch multimedia display, both sharing a curved glass screen.

Oh, and ask a BMW dealer if you can have anything other than the ‘crystal’ multimedia scroller. The reflections will drive you mad…

If you’re in a market for a 2024 BMW i5 M60, why wouldn’t you take the one that’s arguably better looking, can carry more stuff and sits on the exact same footprint as the sedan?

There’s a lot to enjoy about the M60, even if most of the resources were spent delivering an intensity of performance most people are unlikely to regularly use.

Even if it is nod-your-head impressive, dialling up maximum pace for any more than microbursts is not (like it is with most mega-quick EVs) remotely engaging.

That leaves the rest of what it does, and the M60 is very comfortable, very organised and enormously practical, with all that performance still up its sleeve.

And its arrival here will take the Australian market’s tally of full-sized, fast, luxury EV wagons at this price point up to, well, one.

2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring at a glance:
Price: $219,900 (plus on-road costs)
Available: Third quarter 2024
Powertrain: Front and rear current-excited synchronous motors
Output: 380kW/795Nm (overboost 442kW)
Transmission: Single-speed reduction gear
Battery: 81.2kWh lithium-ion (net)
Range: 445-506km (WLTP)
Energy consumption: 18.3-20.8kWh/100km (WLTP)
Safety rating: Not tested