2010 BMW X5 M
Most of the cars that flaunt the BMW’s famous ‘M’ badge maintain duality in their character. The BMW X5 M looks sturdy. The huge steering wheel provides a firm grip to your hands, where as its strong heart throbs powerfully on the hood. In full M mode, the BMW displays its brute force with the engine screaming in rage and the huge tires are held tightly to the ground. Other than the alloy wheels of 20 inches, the BMW X5M look similar to its counterparts.
The front portion of the car describes the car’s vigorous character clearly, with large amount of bulky vents that contain black honeycombs that enclose the conventional BMW kidney grille and covering the area beneath the bumper. 4 pipes project out on the tailgate, revealing the M badge. Standard features of X5 M car are the ample cargo, clamshell tailgate, a panoramic sunproof and a BMW interior of unique quality. Plenty of leather is present in the X5 M’s seats, cabin and the insets of door but the dashboard is a plastic of soft material.
The console reveals the BMW’s new iDrive controller which works pretty well. The controller allows you to choose menu items from the LCD of the car that offers quick access to the buttons required for navigation, audio, stereo and the phone. It also has an ‘Option’ button close to the controller and a ‘Settings’ item which leads to various menus. The iDrive allows you to program the ‘M’ button of the steering wheel and customize it based on the performance of the BMW X5 M.
For stability and suspension control, you have a choice of selecting either sport or normal settings. Select normal or power for the BMW engine and give a command to the head up display to proceed to the unique M view. If you desire, you can deactivate the stability control. The changes that you make will come to effect only when you press the M button on the steering wheel. Normally, the suspension and stability mode can be set to sport and the engine to power mode. If you try driving the BMW at the normal mode, you might experience very less power of the twin turbo.
When the car is accelerated, the turbine whines speeds up, making the noise similar to a jet plane. It has a huge horsepower and the torque is 501 pound-feet, better than it predecessors. The car produces a fuel economy of 13.2miles/galleon at an average. The car has a 22 galleon tank with which you can easily travel for 300 miles or more. The car weighs more than 5000 pounds which makes the car alarmingly fast. The BMW states that the X5 M car can travel 62miles / hour in 4.7seconds, which is indeed great.
The 6 speed automatic transmission is available. Sadly, the car lacks a dual clutch box or a manual as present in the car M3. The acceleration is at its best with heavy, aluminum paddle shifters. Since the increase in the speed of the engine is very fast, it causes the tach needle to cross the redline. The automatic’s sport mode is really good, but sometimes absurd. As the car is driven along sharp, curved turns, the sport program system automatically changes to the lower gear correctly at the peak and allows the engine speed to increase quickly before changing to the higher gear.
Unfortunately, the car downshifted when there was no need since it misunderstood the steering and gas inputs, which largely swayed the car. The ‘Cornering’ technology in the car is a pleasant experience since the all-wheel-drive BMW rotates at the corners smoothly. A standard air suspension is present on the BMW, but its controlling is enhanced by electronic antiroll bars and electromagnetic dampers. The BMW’s amazing technology continuously monitors the steering angle, speed and utilizes the suspension components to oppose the movement of the car which would otherwise lose control.
The steering wheel of BMW X5 M has the capacity of turning around corners at immense speed without any jerk. Normally, BMW sedans get the back end out by allowing a small drift in corners to point the car in the right direction. Similar behavior is found in the X5 M which is an SUV and an all wheel drive. Generally, all wheel drive sports cars keep their rear wheels in the path of the front wheel, but stunningly, the BMW has crafted the X5 M to manage rear end drift.
The BMW, with its all wheel drive system is tuned particularly for sport driving. It manages to transfer the torque from front to back and also infuses power along the rear axle, giving the outside wheel, an additional twist during a turn. In M mode, the power is concentrated on the rear wheels, resulting in the rear wheel drift that I mentioned earlier. The navigation system plays a keen role in adding to the pleasure and fun of driving on mountains by exhibiting topographic outline in 3D mode.
For people who are interested in exploring a new territory upto a mile or more, they can view satellite imagery on maps which gives complete details of the mountain or canyon. But, the standard street view map has a dull color scheme. Streets appear light gray and the surroundings look slightly darker which makes it troublesome to distinguish individual roads. The resolution of street name is good, but the font is very small to read other details.
The BMW route guidance algorithm is not good since it gets stuck to the route that it thinks is right rather than accepting another route that is chosen by us. The other cars are designed to adjust to our decision where as BMW keeps forcing you to take the route it wishes to be taken. Otherwise, it is superb in providing useful graphics for corners and also reads out the street names. It amazingly avoids traffic congestion by informing you about traffic jams and hence changes the route in time, which is most important.
The Bluetooth hands free phone system works pretty well. It can easily be connected to an iPhone, by inserting the contact list to the car and thus making it accessible on the LCD. It lacks the feature of voice dialing by name which is found in most Ford cars. The BMW X5 M has a stereo consisting of 16 speakers and a 600 watt nine channel digital amplifier, which produces high intensity sound. The system exhibits a splendid quality, reproducing music with staging and perfect clarity. But the sound appears to echo throughout the car.
The stereo handles bass heavy tracks very well which adds delight to music lovers. Along with the bass controls and the normal treble, BMW incorporates a 7 band equalizer for fine tuning of sound. A 80GB onboard hard drive is available which reserves 15GB of space for music, HD radio, iPod and local music. The interface allows you to navigate by album, artist and genre. Satellite radio is an additional feature along with an in-dash CD player that reads MP3 CDs. A DVD player mounted on a glove box is present along with a rear seat entertainment system.
An innovative parking system, a top-view camera along with sonar distance sensors and a rear view camera are available which keeps the X5 M dent-free. The rear view camera possesses trajectory and distance overlay lines which is very useful. A click on the iDrive controller enables you to swap the view to top-down which reveals the side objects. The camera views blink strangely sometimes which is not expected.
A head-up display is available which displays the speed of the car projected on the windshield. If you enter your desired destination to the navigation system, the route guidance instructions will be provided on the display. In M mode, the display features a colorful tachometer, current gear of the car and speed. To get superb handling and power out of the BMW, the twin turbo technology involves the dynamic antiroll bars, air suspension and electromagnetic dampers. It also yields a horsepower of 555 from the engine.
The fuel economy and automatic transmission are bad. The traffic routing feature could include weather as its data source. The phone system is really good, but does not stand equal with the other systems. A blind spot detection system could be incorporated into the BMW. The cabin tech interface is not designed properly leading to minor problems. But, the BMW X5 M clears all its drawbacks with its stylish and stunning looks.
Related posts:
