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The 2025 BMW M5 Needs to Decide If It’s for Business or Pleasure

The 2025 BMW M5 Needs to Decide If It’s for Business or Pleasure

The 2025 BMW M5 Needs to Decide If It’s for Business or Pleasure


Fabian Kirchbauer

It’s a rare day when BMW reveals a new M5. It’s only happened seven times in human history, after all — and when it comes, it’s always met with strong reactions from the legions of fans. Yet when the Bavarian Motor Works revealed the latest generation, known internally as the G90, in April of 2024, the response was skewed unusually strongly towards the negative. New M5s always spark some controversy — It’s ugly! There’s no manual! It’s as long as a 7 Series used to be! — but the brouhaha over the latest one felt different. It would be easy to credit it to the darkened state of online discourse in 2024 … but in reality, it was a complaint about weight. At 5,390 lbs, the seventh-gen M5 weighs around 1,100 pounds more than its predecessor, even though its dimensions have barely grown.

Why? Three words, or two if you bundle them with your hyphens: plug-in hybrid. For the first time, the M5 was merging gasoline and electric propulsion.

At the heart of the G90 sedan and G99 station wagon (better known as the M5 Touring) lies the same powertrain pioneered by the little-loved XM crossover: a 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8, and an electric motor connected to the eight-speed automatic and fed by a 14.8-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. The maximum combined output of this gas-electric combination comes to 717 horsepower and 738 lb-ft of torque, a full 90 horses and 186 lb-ft more than the most potent version of its predecessor, the M5 CS.  But the added mass means each of the new M5’s ponies must push around 7.52 pounds; the hard-edged M5 CS boasted a superior 6.53 lbs/hp. Even the more mainstream M5 Competition of yore — a closer analog to this new model — only had to wrangle 6.88 lbs per horse.




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