The BMW M5 is a high-performance variant of the BMW 5 Series marketed under the BMW M sub-brand. It is considered an iconic vehicle in the sports saloon category. The first M5 model was hand-built beginning in late 1984 on the E28 535i chassis with a modified engine from the M1 that made it the fastest production saloon at the time. M5 models have been produced for every generation of the 5 Series since 1984, with occasional gaps in production (1995 to 1998, 2023 to 2024). Official website: BMW M
Big Sam
Highway Hunter
Yeah. It's almost as if these unscientific tests are a load of bollox.
Frankie G
Premium
I'm not sure if the following is a paid for article but thought I'd share.
BMW M5 CS review: the king of super-saloons – despite its £140,000 price.
With 189mph and 0-62mph in 3sec on tap, there’s no doubting the CS’s credentials as the ultimate fast four-door saloon, but does it deliver?
One hundred and forty thousand, seven hundred and eighty pounds. It’s a price so monumental, it feels like it needs to be written out long-hand. This is, it goes without saying, an expensive car by anyone’s reckoning – but it is an extraordinary amount of money for a BMW 5-Series, which starts from £100,000 less.
Yet this is no ordinary 5-Series. The original M5 of 1984 combined the BMW Motorsport division’s chassis know-how with a near-race-spec M88 six-cylinder engine from the company’s M1 supercar in an unassuming 5-Series body.
It was billed as a four-door supercar, a claim which was not without merit. Today, that’s exactly the territory the M5 CS is striking for once again. Through that lens the price gains, if not sense, then context; after all, an Audi R8 V10 Quattro will set you back similar money, and it doesn’t have the M5’s extra seats and doors. You might even call the M5 CS good value – if your grip on reality was sufficiently loose.
So if the M5 CS is to come close to justifying that enormous price tag, it had better deliver a supercar-like driving experience. Moreover, it had better feel as though it is more than just the sum of its parts – much more than a 5-Series with a big engine and a bodykit. In other words, it had better feel pretty bloomin’ special.
Pros
- Blistering pace
- Extraordinary handling
- Remarkably usable
Cons
- The price
Er…
- Oh, here’s something: the seats are a bit knobbly
Under the skin
What exactly do you get for all that cash? Power comes from the same 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 engine as the M5 Competition, but output has been raised by 10bhp, and by 35bhp compared with the (now defunct) standard M5. This takes the CS to a total of 626bhp, making it the most powerful M5 ever.
What else? Well, on paper, surprisingly little. The biggest difference you’ll spot is buried in the technical stats at the back of the brochure; a weight saving of 70kg compared with the Competition, achieved through the deletion of certain bits of interior trim, as well as the addition of a carbon-fibre bonnet and bodykit. Oh, and those rather lovely carbon-fibre bucket seats – four of them – which we’ll come back to.
But what you can’t see from the spec sheet is the work that’s been done to massage the CS’s suspension. First up, the adjustable dampers from the M8 Gran Coupe have been fitted, a change that BMW says have helped better control bump and rebound. Meanwhile, the CS sits a fraction lower than the M5 Competition, and its spring rates and bushes have been massaged to take account of the car’s lower weight, long with the increased grip from the Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres that are fitted to the gloriously rose gold, 20-inch forged alloy wheels.
For all that flab-trimming, though, don’t imagine that this M5 is a slip of a thing; it still weighs in at a not-inconsiderable 1,825kg, a by-product of the big engine, the adaptive dampers, the standard four-wheel drive and, of course, all the equipment. No, BMW hasn’t scrimped on life’s luxuries; this is a CS, rather than a CSL (L for lightweight), after all, so it retains most of the M5’s standard equipment including heated seats, cruise control, a virtual gauge cluster and so on.
You might gather from this that the CS isn’t a stripped-out track specialist, and you’d be right. BMW could have tried to turn the CS into such a thing, but with a big, heavy, four-door body shell, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Instead, the CS is pitched as the ultimate super saloon – and that means it must succeed not only on a smooth racing circuit, but also on the road, where it must be able to blitz a B-road just as well as it scoffs motorway miles.
Cruise missile
Does it? Well, yes. As a cruiser, the M5 CS is good – surprisingly so. From the moment you pull away, you can feel the car quivering on its stiff suspension, which has you bracing yourself over bumps, but this edgy low-speed ride gives way to firm, but not uncomfortable, damping at urban speeds, and a surprisingly smooth mien on the motorway.
Granted, you can always tell that the CS has large diameter wheels with the slimmest of tyre sidewalls, as it tells you about pretty much every stone and surface change you drive over. But crucially, this background patter never translates to jiggliness or crashiness. In fact, the only real problem, if you can call it that, is that you have to turn the stereo up to mask the white noise of the tyres’ big, wide contact patches.
The seats are comfortable, too, though you don’t feel they will be when you climb in. Between your legs sits a vaguely threatening lump of carbon-fibre, which seems to have no reason to exist other than to force you to sit with your knees compromisingly spread. Thankfully, once you’ve settled in, this proves to be inconsequential, as your thighs (not to mention other parts of your anatomy) rarely interact with it, and the rest of the seat provides support just where you need it.
In the rear, the standard M5’s bench has been replaced by two more individual carbon bucket seats, which means it’s only a four-seater. But who cares? Barely anyone ever used the middle rear seat in an M5 anyway, and this way, at least the rear passengers will be just as comfortable (and held in place just as well) as those in the front.
What’s more, each rear seat has an Isofix mount, so children get to enjoy the CS along with you (indeed, your correspondent’s two-year-old daughter learned to say the phrase “fast again, please” – and, unequivocally, what it meant – from the rear seat of our test car).
In common with most other 5-Series, the rest of the interior is great, with a slick infotainment screen and easy-to-use controls; there are enough bits of carbon-fibre and lines of red stitching about the place to remind you that you’re in something a bit special, too.
On the road
There are a lot of ways you can play around with the CS’s set-up. You can make the suspension softer or firmer, adjust the throttle mapping, tweak the weight of the steering and even adjust the speed of the gearshifts, for example.
And, of course, you can switch it into two-wheel-drive mode, at which point all the power gets sent to the rear wheels instead of all four. You can turn off the traction control, too, and if you do both of these the M5 CS is particularly adept at lurid powerslides. Or so we’re given to understand; mud-strewn Kentish lanes in the depths of winter aren’t the place to attempt such antics.
Yet even in four-wheel drive mode, and with its pleasingly laissez-faire electronic aids left activated, the M5 CS shone.
It’s the front end that grabs you first. The steering is deft, precise and perfectly weighted, and it’s matched to a nose of unshakeable grip, yet one that feels light and malleable as you turn in.
What catches your attention next is the way the car’s weight shifts. Or, to be precise, the way it doesn’t. You’d never guess the CS weighs nearly two tonnes, because you can bowl it into a bend like a two-seater sports car; there’s no sense of wallowing or lean, and you never feel as though you need to let the car settle before you apply power.
Nimble – and even sensible
Indeed, the CS feels incredibly light on its feet for such a big, heavy car. You can tweak the steering or throttle however you see fit, and this four-door saloon shifts and twitches like a car half its weight, allowing you to trim your line neatly if you need to, or indulging you with a gentle, progressive and easily held tail slide if you do breach its limits (yes, even in four-wheel-drive mode).
There’s a mature side to the CS too, as it flows through a series of bends as cleanly as your talent will allow. Indeed, such is the grip available, and so well does the CS control its weight, that you find yourself starting to feed that power in before you’ve even arrived at each apex, letting that incredible front end carry you round before you floor the throttle as the corner ebbs away, to blast down the next straight.
And blast you will. It won’t surprise you to learn that acceleration in the M5 CS is a visceral, perception-warping thing, smearing the trees and hedges into a thick, green blur as your head fills with the full-throated, warbling snarl that that V8 produces, and you grip the wheel more tightly lest your fingers be pried from it.
Mind-blowing performance
But in these days of common-or-garden EVs that can accelerate to 62mph almost as quickly, it isn’t the CS’s off-the-line pace that grabs you. What really blows your mind is the way its rate of acceleration barely seems to stint as the speedometer winds its way to licence-losing figures; even at motorway speeds, where one of those fast EVs might start to tail off, the CS just romps on, and it honestly feels as though nothing but a force of nature could slow it down.
Of course, that’s why BMW has fitted the carbon-ceramic brakes you’d normally find on the options list of the standard M5. Such things can sometimes be a bit of a pain to use every day – they’re often squeaky at slow speeds and lacking in feel until they’re warmed up, which takes some serious punishment. Not here, though – in fact, you’re only able to tell they’re there when it dawns on you after half an hour of hard driving that the brakes are just as strong and as positive underfoot as they were when you started out.
The Telegraph verdict
It’s pretty good, then, the M5 CS. But £140,000 good? Well… it sort-of is, actually.
Yes, on the face of it this is a crazy amount of money to spend on such a car. But the fact BMW has already taken deposits on the whole of the UK’s allocation shows that people are willing to pay that price. And while I might not join them, equally, I don’t blame them. The M5 CS has all the performance and dynamic ability of a supercar – yes, it really is that good. And supercars simply don’t come cheap, even when they’re clothed in a saloon body. What’s more, that four-door saloon body – not to mention BMW’s remarkable sleight of hand in making the CS comfortable and usable enough for the daily grind or regular motorway journeys – means this is a supercar you genuinely can use every day, even if you have a family. Not that many people will, of course, because the chances are most CSs will likely be locked away behind closed doors – to appreciate, rather than to be appreciated. Which is a great shame, because this is the most complete and most exciting M5 since the original. And that, in turn, makes it one of the finest cars BMW has ever made.
Telegraph rating: Five stars out of five
- Alex Robbins, for the Telegraph.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/bmw/bmw-m5-cs-review-king-super-saloons-despite-140000-price/
BMW M5 CS review: the king of super-saloons – despite its £140,000 price.
With 189mph and 0-62mph in 3sec on tap, there’s no doubting the CS’s credentials as the ultimate fast four-door saloon, but does it deliver?
One hundred and forty thousand, seven hundred and eighty pounds. It’s a price so monumental, it feels like it needs to be written out long-hand. This is, it goes without saying, an expensive car by anyone’s reckoning – but it is an extraordinary amount of money for a BMW 5-Series, which starts from £100,000 less.
Yet this is no ordinary 5-Series. The original M5 of 1984 combined the BMW Motorsport division’s chassis know-how with a near-race-spec M88 six-cylinder engine from the company’s M1 supercar in an unassuming 5-Series body.
It was billed as a four-door supercar, a claim which was not without merit. Today, that’s exactly the territory the M5 CS is striking for once again. Through that lens the price gains, if not sense, then context; after all, an Audi R8 V10 Quattro will set you back similar money, and it doesn’t have the M5’s extra seats and doors. You might even call the M5 CS good value – if your grip on reality was sufficiently loose.
So if the M5 CS is to come close to justifying that enormous price tag, it had better deliver a supercar-like driving experience. Moreover, it had better feel as though it is more than just the sum of its parts – much more than a 5-Series with a big engine and a bodykit. In other words, it had better feel pretty bloomin’ special.
Pros
- Blistering pace
- Extraordinary handling
- Remarkably usable
Cons
- The price
Er…
- Oh, here’s something: the seats are a bit knobbly
Under the skin
What exactly do you get for all that cash? Power comes from the same 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 engine as the M5 Competition, but output has been raised by 10bhp, and by 35bhp compared with the (now defunct) standard M5. This takes the CS to a total of 626bhp, making it the most powerful M5 ever.
What else? Well, on paper, surprisingly little. The biggest difference you’ll spot is buried in the technical stats at the back of the brochure; a weight saving of 70kg compared with the Competition, achieved through the deletion of certain bits of interior trim, as well as the addition of a carbon-fibre bonnet and bodykit. Oh, and those rather lovely carbon-fibre bucket seats – four of them – which we’ll come back to.
But what you can’t see from the spec sheet is the work that’s been done to massage the CS’s suspension. First up, the adjustable dampers from the M8 Gran Coupe have been fitted, a change that BMW says have helped better control bump and rebound. Meanwhile, the CS sits a fraction lower than the M5 Competition, and its spring rates and bushes have been massaged to take account of the car’s lower weight, long with the increased grip from the Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres that are fitted to the gloriously rose gold, 20-inch forged alloy wheels.
For all that flab-trimming, though, don’t imagine that this M5 is a slip of a thing; it still weighs in at a not-inconsiderable 1,825kg, a by-product of the big engine, the adaptive dampers, the standard four-wheel drive and, of course, all the equipment. No, BMW hasn’t scrimped on life’s luxuries; this is a CS, rather than a CSL (L for lightweight), after all, so it retains most of the M5’s standard equipment including heated seats, cruise control, a virtual gauge cluster and so on.
You might gather from this that the CS isn’t a stripped-out track specialist, and you’d be right. BMW could have tried to turn the CS into such a thing, but with a big, heavy, four-door body shell, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Instead, the CS is pitched as the ultimate super saloon – and that means it must succeed not only on a smooth racing circuit, but also on the road, where it must be able to blitz a B-road just as well as it scoffs motorway miles.
Cruise missile
Does it? Well, yes. As a cruiser, the M5 CS is good – surprisingly so. From the moment you pull away, you can feel the car quivering on its stiff suspension, which has you bracing yourself over bumps, but this edgy low-speed ride gives way to firm, but not uncomfortable, damping at urban speeds, and a surprisingly smooth mien on the motorway.
Granted, you can always tell that the CS has large diameter wheels with the slimmest of tyre sidewalls, as it tells you about pretty much every stone and surface change you drive over. But crucially, this background patter never translates to jiggliness or crashiness. In fact, the only real problem, if you can call it that, is that you have to turn the stereo up to mask the white noise of the tyres’ big, wide contact patches.
The seats are comfortable, too, though you don’t feel they will be when you climb in. Between your legs sits a vaguely threatening lump of carbon-fibre, which seems to have no reason to exist other than to force you to sit with your knees compromisingly spread. Thankfully, once you’ve settled in, this proves to be inconsequential, as your thighs (not to mention other parts of your anatomy) rarely interact with it, and the rest of the seat provides support just where you need it.
In the rear, the standard M5’s bench has been replaced by two more individual carbon bucket seats, which means it’s only a four-seater. But who cares? Barely anyone ever used the middle rear seat in an M5 anyway, and this way, at least the rear passengers will be just as comfortable (and held in place just as well) as those in the front.
What’s more, each rear seat has an Isofix mount, so children get to enjoy the CS along with you (indeed, your correspondent’s two-year-old daughter learned to say the phrase “fast again, please” – and, unequivocally, what it meant – from the rear seat of our test car).
In common with most other 5-Series, the rest of the interior is great, with a slick infotainment screen and easy-to-use controls; there are enough bits of carbon-fibre and lines of red stitching about the place to remind you that you’re in something a bit special, too.
On the road
There are a lot of ways you can play around with the CS’s set-up. You can make the suspension softer or firmer, adjust the throttle mapping, tweak the weight of the steering and even adjust the speed of the gearshifts, for example.
And, of course, you can switch it into two-wheel-drive mode, at which point all the power gets sent to the rear wheels instead of all four. You can turn off the traction control, too, and if you do both of these the M5 CS is particularly adept at lurid powerslides. Or so we’re given to understand; mud-strewn Kentish lanes in the depths of winter aren’t the place to attempt such antics.
Yet even in four-wheel drive mode, and with its pleasingly laissez-faire electronic aids left activated, the M5 CS shone.
It’s the front end that grabs you first. The steering is deft, precise and perfectly weighted, and it’s matched to a nose of unshakeable grip, yet one that feels light and malleable as you turn in.
What catches your attention next is the way the car’s weight shifts. Or, to be precise, the way it doesn’t. You’d never guess the CS weighs nearly two tonnes, because you can bowl it into a bend like a two-seater sports car; there’s no sense of wallowing or lean, and you never feel as though you need to let the car settle before you apply power.
Nimble – and even sensible
Indeed, the CS feels incredibly light on its feet for such a big, heavy car. You can tweak the steering or throttle however you see fit, and this four-door saloon shifts and twitches like a car half its weight, allowing you to trim your line neatly if you need to, or indulging you with a gentle, progressive and easily held tail slide if you do breach its limits (yes, even in four-wheel-drive mode).
There’s a mature side to the CS too, as it flows through a series of bends as cleanly as your talent will allow. Indeed, such is the grip available, and so well does the CS control its weight, that you find yourself starting to feed that power in before you’ve even arrived at each apex, letting that incredible front end carry you round before you floor the throttle as the corner ebbs away, to blast down the next straight.
And blast you will. It won’t surprise you to learn that acceleration in the M5 CS is a visceral, perception-warping thing, smearing the trees and hedges into a thick, green blur as your head fills with the full-throated, warbling snarl that that V8 produces, and you grip the wheel more tightly lest your fingers be pried from it.
Mind-blowing performance
But in these days of common-or-garden EVs that can accelerate to 62mph almost as quickly, it isn’t the CS’s off-the-line pace that grabs you. What really blows your mind is the way its rate of acceleration barely seems to stint as the speedometer winds its way to licence-losing figures; even at motorway speeds, where one of those fast EVs might start to tail off, the CS just romps on, and it honestly feels as though nothing but a force of nature could slow it down.
Of course, that’s why BMW has fitted the carbon-ceramic brakes you’d normally find on the options list of the standard M5. Such things can sometimes be a bit of a pain to use every day – they’re often squeaky at slow speeds and lacking in feel until they’re warmed up, which takes some serious punishment. Not here, though – in fact, you’re only able to tell they’re there when it dawns on you after half an hour of hard driving that the brakes are just as strong and as positive underfoot as they were when you started out.
The Telegraph verdict
It’s pretty good, then, the M5 CS. But £140,000 good? Well… it sort-of is, actually.
Yes, on the face of it this is a crazy amount of money to spend on such a car. But the fact BMW has already taken deposits on the whole of the UK’s allocation shows that people are willing to pay that price. And while I might not join them, equally, I don’t blame them. The M5 CS has all the performance and dynamic ability of a supercar – yes, it really is that good. And supercars simply don’t come cheap, even when they’re clothed in a saloon body. What’s more, that four-door saloon body – not to mention BMW’s remarkable sleight of hand in making the CS comfortable and usable enough for the daily grind or regular motorway journeys – means this is a supercar you genuinely can use every day, even if you have a family. Not that many people will, of course, because the chances are most CSs will likely be locked away behind closed doors – to appreciate, rather than to be appreciated. Which is a great shame, because this is the most complete and most exciting M5 since the original. And that, in turn, makes it one of the finest cars BMW has ever made.
Telegraph rating: Five stars out of five
- Alex Robbins, for the Telegraph.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/bmw/bmw-m5-cs-review-king-super-saloons-despite-140000-price/
hovabongZA
Tire Trailblazer
The best of the best.
Frankie G
Premium
The BMW M5 CS is a winner at this years Autocar Awards. And BMW won the best Manufacturer category as well.
www.autocar.co.uk
Our Five-Star Car: the BMW M5 CS | Autocar
Autocar Awards 2022: Why we chose the BMW M5 CS as our favourite car of the year
hovabongZA
Tire Trailblazer
The upcoming M4CSL, M3CS and M2CS have very very big shoes to fill !!!
Frankie G
Premium
///Mighty shoes ?
This important video belongs more to "all kind of sales" since it describes very well and from a very accurate point of view, why it is the company that it is and why it will continue to be.
Sunny
Premium
Indeed. And the prices reflect that. I have talked to about 17 dealers now. For a new one it is anywhere from 45k+ to 75k+. That is unfortunately just too much for me.
Mick Briesgau
Tire Trailblazer
Do I understand correct, that you have to pay those figures you mention on top of the mrsp?
Sunny
Premium
Yup. One of the the quotes from couple of days ago -
FWIW, they came down to 200k since, but still ridiculous.
Similar threads
BMW M
BMW M GmbH, formerly known as BMW Motorsport GmbH, is a subsidiary of
BMW AG that manufactures high-performance luxury cars. BMW M ("M" for "motorsport")
was initially created to facilitate BMW's racing program, which was very successful
in the 1960s and 1970s. As time passed, BMW M began to supplement BMW's vehicle
portfolio with specially modified higher trim models, for which they are now most
known by the general public. These M-badged cars traditionally include modified engines,
transmissions, suspensions, interior trims, aerodynamics, and exterior modifications
to set them apart from their counterparts. All M models are tested and tuned at BMW's
private facility at the Nürburgring racing circuit in Germany.
Official website: BMW M
Official website: BMW M
