I don’t envy the position in which the 2025 BMW M5 Touring finds itself. It should’ve broken the internet. It’s a 717-horsepower wagon packing a twin-turbo V8, all-wheel-drive you can switch to tire-shredding rear-drive at the touch of a button, and the ability to make your licence disappear in the blink of an eye. Did I mention it’s a wagon? An M5 wagon, for chrissakes!
That’s a very big deal for us. BMW did an M5 wagon, or Touring in BMW parlance, for the E34 and E60 generations. They’re incredibly cool and incredibly rare; BMW produced about 1,000 examples of each just for Europe, and Europe only. Now, some 15 years and three M5 generations later, it’s a lot easier to get our mitts on one. This latest G99-generation car is the first time (and let’s face it, probably the last time) BMW is selling a long-roof M5 directly to us in the Great White North. You could say there’s a wee bit of hype surrounding this car.
Doubly so with what’s underneath. The 2025 M5 starts with a familiar 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8, putting out 577 horsepower and 553 pound-feet of torque on its own. Those numbers ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at, but the kicker is the plug-in hybrid portion of the powertrain. Here, an electric motor and a 14.8 kWh lithium-ion battery pack lend a few distinct advantages: the new M5 can do up to 40 kilometres in electric-only mode, it can fully charge its battery from empty in about an hour and 45 minutes on a charger you’d typically find at the mall or office, and depending on where you live, you’re allowed to bum the carpool lane solo.
Oh, and the electric bits push total output of this sensible, practical, plug-in hybrid wagon to 717 ponies and 738 pound-feet of twist. BMW also says the M5 Touring knocks off the zero-to-100 km/h sprint in 3.6 seconds, and if you keep your foot in it, it’ll top out at 305 km/h provided you’re working with the M Driver’s Pack, enough road, and the testicular fortitude to do so.
Heady as those numbers are, you could be forgiven for thinking BMW tamed this beast of a family hauler too much for its own good. In the right conditions, the new M5 fires up in electric mode by default, making a fairly drama-free first impression that carries on even after you’ve set off. The new M5 doesn’t feel as overtly electric in EV mode as most other PHEVs; its artificial soundtrack does a very good job at mimicking the distant thrum of a European V8 rather than a spaceship, and the M5’s eight-speed automatic still shifts gears here.
But you can just as easily turn off the fake engine noise, and the zappy bits are potent enough to keep the M5 in electric mode on the highway. You could comfortably and sensibly commute to work without making a peep and burning a drop of dino juce.
Good luck with that, because that takes an unparalleled amount of self-control and discipline. Enthusiasts know there’s often subtle wink-and-nod with any set of numbers BMW flexes. Much like the sedan, the M5 Touring is fast. Set everything to full-kill, activate launch control, and after a very brief pause as the tires scrub to find grip, the M5 furiously shoots off the line and refuses to let up. With the V8 bellowing at the top of its lungs and electrons pitching in with all their might, it keeps pulling and pulling and pulling with the same unrelenting ferocity at speed on the highway as it does off the line, closing any gap, ripping down any wide-open merge lane, or blasting off from a green light into the stratosphere in the blink of an eye. The new M5 constantly playing a game of gas-pedal chicken with you, and you’ll always lose.
But I expect fast. Everyone does. What I didn’t expect was how long it’d take me to come around to this newest M5 for a couple of reasons. It’s no secret the new M5 weighs a lot, and the Touring version packs on an extra 140 pounds. It also hides that weight well, between the straight-line speed, the array of software tricks, the surprising bit of feedback delivered through the steering wheel, and the 285-section front tires and 295s out back keeping everything glued to the road.
All that masking, all that trying to distract us from the 5,530-pound elephant in the room lends a sense of physics-defying effortlessness to the M5 that some may say shouldn’t be there. And I agree—it shouldn’t be this easy to commute with a 717-hp missile and average 10.6 L/100 km, despite our best intentions otherwise. Laying 11s shouldn’t be as easy as flipping the AWD system into RWD and letting it rip. I shouldn’t be able to go to Home Hardware and Ikea one day, and a track day hosted by my local BMW club the next. I shouldn’t be able to defy physics and live with supercar performance so effortlessly.
On top of that, for all the foibles that may or may not be associated with modern M cars, the M3 and M4 CS show BMW can still impart a sense of connectivity and feedback in a modern car backed by all the software. The new M5 is surprisingly chatty and feelsome out of the box, but would it be too unreasonable to ask for a bit more of that black magic here? Older M5s were darlings here.
And that’s when it hit me: I shouldn’t be looking at this new M5 through the windshield of its forebears, because everyone complained about them, too. The E28 M5 was a revelation, stuffing motorsports-derived engineering, world-beating performance, and cutting-edge tech—at least, for the time—into a midsize executive sedan. Every M5 since then has abided by these principles, but that didn’t stop people from complaining that the E34 lost the E28’s rawness; that the E39—the GOAT—had recirculating-ball steering and therefore lacked remotely good feel; that the E60 looked the way it did and was automatic; that the F10 really packed on the pounds and was still automatic; that the F90 went all-wheel-drive and packed on more pounds … and here we are.
You just can’t win. Hindsight is always 20/20, so instead of knocking the 2025 BMW M5 Touring for missing very specific bars its predecessors set, look at this newest one in the context of what an M5 should be: a genuinely fast, hilariously fun, and cushy executive sedan (or wagon) turned rocketship. If this newest M5 needed to adopt such a radical powertrain change (and consequently gain an admittedly less-than-ideal amount of weight), then so be it. It’s an M5 for the modern age; is that better than none at all? Thought so. Now stop complaining, because in 20 years, we’re all going to love these things.
