Living with a BMW M5 Touring: Is this the perfect estate car?

There are plenty of cars which are supremely powerful and immensely fast, but most of them are sporty two-seaters which are no good for a family outing. There are even more cars on sale which will comfortably haul five people around, but they’re unlikely to get your heart racing on a nice road.

The BMW M5 Touring is, on paper, the best of both worlds. A thunderous yet fuel efficient hybrid engine with four-wheel-drive and enough space for your nearest and dearest – plus all of their luggage.

It’s certainly spacious, with more than enough room for four adults to travel in comfort with no complaints. Children will have a great time in the back of an M5 Touring, especially with day-care orange leather seats brightening the cabin. There’s loads of leg room, and a pair of USB-C chargers in the back of the front seats – handy for iPads on long drives.

The M5 Touring commands as much attention from ordinary passers-by as it does from car enthusiasts. Maybe it’s the naughty exhaust note, the rarity factor or the hype and outrage that comes with a performance estate that weighs the same as a country manor…

We got a surprising number of thumbs up from other drivers and pedestrians, even in the unassuming grey which our M5 was painted in. We also experienced a fair amount of dirty looks, but that’s par for the course in a loud, two-metre wide super-estate with a light up grille.

What’s the point of an estate car if you don’t take advantage of its enormous cargo bay? The M5 may lose a smidge of boot space compared to a regular 5 Series, but it still swallowed up 2 enormous rugs and an old barbecue with ease. The lack of a lip on the boot edge made loading and unloading the M5 for a piece of cake; perfect for a tip run.

Slip the M5 into electric mode and it becomes a cosseting cruiser. On a gentle commute to Canary Wharf the engine didn’t kick in once, and at no point did the M5 touring struggle to keep up with in city and dual carriageway traffic. On the way back, the M5 even got the all-important seal of approval from the other half – but the interior lighting was deemed tacky.

With all of the boring practical stuff out the way, it was time for a treat and to point the big fast BMW to a series of country lanes to find out just what it was capable of. The short answer is that it is capable of a lot.

With well over 700hp, a trick four-wheel-drive system and a hybrid set up that keeps you accelerating even when changing gears, the M5 builds speed relentlessly. It’ll maintain that speed through corners, but no matter how impressive it is, and no matter how giddy the acceleration makes you, the M5 Touring is a hair short of being truly fun on a country lane.

The sheer size of the thing is just too much for our narrow B-roads, and you find yourself tensing up when pitching into fast bends; you’ve no room to manoeuvre should someone driving toward you be over the hatched line.

There’s no doubt that the M5 is a hugely capable car with a lot of good traits, but it just misses out on being the perfect family supercar.

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