[Auto/Moto] We Drove the New BMW M5. It's a Hybrid Missile

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You’ve already seen the news. The M5 is back. Like every generational leap before this seventh-gen super sedan, BMW brought enough performance hyperbole to blow a hole in the sun. Its new M5 is the heaviest, baddest, most-powerful, most-capable, and most-complex one yet. Again. The burning question: do heaps of hyperbole make the M5 any better to drive? BMW invited us to Austria’s Salzburgring to answer that question.But first, the M5 basics, abridged: A 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8 feeds 577 horses through an eight-speed automatic. This time, power routes to all four wheels by default, though the driver can select two-wheel drive when the mood strikes.Bolstering the internal-combustion mill is a 194-horsepower electric motor integrated within the transmission. The pair produces a total of 717 horsepower and 1000 Newton-meters (that’s 738 pound-feet of twist, but doesn’t a nice round thousand read better?). With 18.6 kilowatt-hours worth of batteries living in the Bimmer’s belly, you’ll manage around 42 miles before the dino juice steps in to wake the V-8. BMW claims that’s more pure electric distance than any competitor.There’s the requisite widebody treatment, M5-only exterior touches, and a chassis specific to BMW’s sportiest sedan. Twenty-inch wheels up front. Twenty-ones out back. Hankook rubber wrapped the wheels of our prototypes, though different markets receive different tires across the board. BMW allowed a few three-lap back-to-back sprints of the Salzburgring in a camouflaged M5 prototype, plus ample seat time in a production-ready M4 CS. These laps illustrated a number of commonalities and disparities between the cars’ approaches to speed. In the first seconds behind the wheel, the M5’s hybrid system dominates proceedings. The Salzburgring’s pit exit blends into a short sprint down its front straight, which means a slam on the gas as you head toward the track’s first corners, then heavy brakes into a right-left chicane that requires a darting, squared-off pair of steering inputs.

https://www.motor1.com/reviews/724314/2025-bmw-m5-first-drive-review/