The M5 Touring’s belt-and-braces hardware features a beefy 4.4-litre engine that makes 577bhp at 5600-6500rpm on its own, and pairs it with a 195bhp gearbox-mounted motor, with the two of them combining to have up to 718bhp driving all four wheels (or two, if you select the right mode).
To give it a respectable motor-only range of up to 40 miles, the battery is generously sized for a plug-in, at 18.6kWh – a similar size to an original BMW i3’s, which gives you an indication of how far it could push a tiny, lightweight car.
This 5096mm long M5 that can seat five or have up to 1630 litres of luggage capacity is not a tiny, lightweight car. The hardware is bulky and weighty, so it has grown externally to cope; flared arches have made the M5 Touring wider than a regular 5-Series, at 1970mm, 70mm wider than a normal 5 Series.
And when I searched the press bumf for “kg” the only result that came up is that you can put 2000kg on a trailer – a potentially quite useful thing to know, but perhaps more important is the lesser screamed about 2550kg kerbweight – 40kg up on the saloon [EU weight, so including that driver/luggage-imitating 75kg over the DIN figure].
The better news, such as it is, is that when we road tested the M5 saloon, it tipped our scales, fully-fuelled but otherwise empty, at 2373kg. So this wagon is probably more like 2410kg at the kerb.
