BMW Won’t Make The Heavy M5 Mistake Twice

BMW learned one thing from the reveal of the latest M5 super sedan, but it’s not the lesson you’re hoping for. Instead of taking the advice of all of the internet’s experts and lowering the car’s weight, the automaker has a different solution. BMW won’t tell you the weight, at least not until drivers can get behind the wheel of the car.

It’s a clever solution. Instead of letting the internet stew about the car weighing half a ton more than the car it replaced for months, BMW hopes that it will get lost in the explosion of horsepower.

“What I personally have learned [launching M5] is the way social media works,” BMW M CEO Frank van Meel told Carsales Australia.

BMW’s first look at the car was at a racetrack, but it didn’t permit published driving impressions. So the stories were about the numbers. “And actually, we told some numbers, including the weight, and then that was the only number people started talking about,” van Meel said.

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“Of course, we knew that [how it drives], so for us it was logical to just say everything, but we underestimated a little bit the social media experience,” he said.

The G90 M5 is the first M5 that’s a plug-in hybrid. The 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 and its electric assist add up to 717 horsepower, 100 hp more than the old M5. Despite all that power, the new car weighs 5,368 pounds, 1,300 pounds more than a standard 5 Series and around 900 lbs more than the old M5. Somehow, it’s heavier than the all-electric i5.

Next time, BMW won’t tell you how heavy its hybrid performance car is. “Next time, and you see it with other competitors, they’ve learned a lot; every competitor that’s currently launching hybridized sports cars does not reveal the weight until the test drive, so that’s the key learning,” van Meel said.

M Gets The Last Laugh As Sales Soar

BMW is getting the last laugh, though. Van Meel said that BMW has already had to boost production volumes of the M5 and is still struggling to meet demand. Some of its biggest markets are already sold out for the first half of this year. This makes sense since most M5 buyers never go near a track or exploit the full potential of the super sedan anyway.

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The high-performance executive stands by the M5 driving experience, too. Even when it’s all-electric. “It’s the perfect combination of adrenaline-fueled driving dynamics and sophisticated everyday use,” he told us last year. He said that the choice was a hybrid M5 or all-electric, and neither the market nor the company was ready for the latter. It would require too many compromises to become BMW’s big high-performance sports sedan, and he called the extra weight “unavoidable.”

Source: Carsales