2024 BMW i5 Review: The New Electric 5 Series Is Here

Today's video is brought to you by Cars and Bids, my online enthusiast car auction site that recently sold this and this and this and this and this. Check it out at carsandbids.com. This is the new 2024 BMW i5, which is the all-new fully electric version of BMW's redesigned 5 Series. The 5 Series has been on the market for over 50 years. This is the beginning of the eighth generation and today I'm going to review it and show you all of its quirks and features. All right, time for the quirks and features of the new BMW i5, the electric version of the new 5 Series. First, a little 5 Series overview. BMW has been selling this car for 50 years and the 2024 model is a new full redesign. There's two basic versions available, a gas-powered model, still called the 5 Series, and then an electric one called the i5. Now, the gas-powered 5 Series starts around $59,000 and it offers various powertrains from 255 horses up to 485, but there's no more V8. The 550i model now has a plug-in hybrid six-cylinder that makes that 485 horsepower. Or you could go electric with your new 5 Series and get an i5. The i5 starts around $68,000 and it offers two versions. There's this one, the i5 eDrive40. This is rear-wheel drive with 335 horsepower and about 295 miles of range. Or you can step up to the i5 M60, the high-performance version, which has an amazing 590 horsepower. Now, that starts around $85,000 and it drops the range figure to about 255 miles, so not as much, but it does have all-wheel drive and it'll do 0-60 in 3.3 seconds. Still, when it comes to the i5, this version, the eDrive40, is going to be the one that most shoppers choose. So, on to the quirks and features and let's start on the outside where, well, actually, I think the styling is pretty tame. It's gotten some criticism that it's not all that attractive, but I have heard that criticism about every single new BMW model when it came out for my entire life, and so I don't put too much stock in that. In fact, I think people, when they start to see this car on the road, will think it's sort of tame and relatively uninteresting. Not beautiful, but in my opinion, not ugly. A good mainstream car, which is what the 5 Series is. In fact, it's so tame on the outside, there aren't really that many quirks. You do have little number 5 printed here beside the rear windows, which is an interesting addition to the 5 Series, and you also have a large grille, which is especially interesting in the i5 because it doesn't need any grille since it's electric, but it has a huge one to fit in with new BMW design philosophy, and that's certainly been controversial. Now, speaking of controversial, one thing enthusiasts have complained about is this car's increasing size. The new 5 Series is now 199 inches long, which makes this longer than the BMW 7 Series from only 20 years ago. That Chris Bangle-designed, weird-looking 7 Series, this is bigger than that. Just proving how much car design sizing has increased over the years, this certainly has become a pretty big car, and with that, it now has a backup beeper. Yes, that's right. When you put it in reverse, it makes this noise. I guess they do that because electric cars don't make noise, and so to alert people that it's coming, they have that. It's sort of like the beep, beep, from construction equipment, except modernized and made more luxurious. The 5 Series backup beeper. And actually, sounds are kind of a theme in this car. Interesting, unusual sounds. When you climb inside, it gives you sort of a welcome sound. And then, when you're sitting in the seat and you press the start-stop button to turn the car on and get going, there's kind of a blast-off sound. But even more unusual and quirky than the sounds you hear when you get in this car and start it up, the mood lighting. When you unlock the doors and open them, you'll see it kind of dances. The lighting on all the trim pieces, the dashboard, the door panels, it sort of dances around, waiting for you to get inside. Now, once you do get inside and sit down, the lights stop dancing, they become static, fixed in place, but they're still unusual. Especially on the dashboard, it looks like sort of jagged edge glass, which it isn't, but it gives that vibe. Certainly more interesting than traditional mood lighting or trim lighting you see inside most new cars. Interestingly, these lighted panels, which you have on the dashboard and the door panel, you can also press them and there are buttons on them. For instance, on the driver's door panel, you have the seat memory included in this lighted panel. They don't have individual buttons, you just tap the lighted panel in the appropriate place. Same deal with the door locks over there. In the center control stack, the lighted panel, you can see, has your hazard lights and your front and rear window defrosters instead of traditional buttons you press there. And these lighted panels also have this slider. You can see it goes from zero to one and you can swipe your finger up and down. What is that? It's the climate vents. If you slide to zero, it turns off the corresponding climate vent. And if you slide it to one, it turns the vent all the way on. And obviously, somewhere in between, the climate vent is partially open. Now, as you're looking at this, you might think to yourself, what climate vents? Because as you look inside this interior on the dashboard, you don't see any. There's no obvious climate vents like in every other car. Instead, they're hidden. The center ones are in this little space below the center screen, very small, very hidden. And same deal on the driver's side. The climate vent is here. You can barely see it. And on the passenger side, the intent, I guess, is a minimalist interior, not cluttered by climate vents. But the result, they're very small and out of the way. But they can be adjusted specifically by using these switches that go up, down, left, right. That can change the positioning of the climate vents. I actually find it kind of unusual. The switches for the vents are more pronounced and obvious than the vents themselves. They've made those switches unusually prominent, considering the goal was to declutter the dashboard and hide any sense of climate vents. And there are more interesting and quirky controls in this interior. On the ceiling above your head, this button here with a light on it doesn't actually turn on the interior lights when you press it. Instead, it pulls up a menu on the infotainment screen that allows you to adjust the ambient lighting, whether the light turns on when you open the door, all that stuff. All of your lighting options are turned on by pressing this light button in the ceiling. Next up, the gear selector is kind of odd. It's this switch, which is in the center, sort of strangely shapen. You pull it back for drive, push it forward for reverse. The operation makes sense, but it's certainly unusual compared to most gear switches or levers. You also have a shift paddle in this car on the left side of the steering wheel that's marked boost. If you pull that, it gives you a quick 10 second boost of power so you can have extra performance. Like if you're going to make a quick pass on the freeway, you pull the boost paddle and you can go a little bit faster than you normally would. Obviously, it probably depletes your range pretty quickly, which is why it's temporary. And another cool control in here is this glass wheel in the center console. You can adjust this wheel by twisting it or move it up, down, left, right, and it changes what you see on the infotainment screen. This is one of your infotainment controllers, but it's better than some plastic controller, a glass wheel. It just looks good. And this brings us to the infotainment system, which in this car is mounted on a giant curved panel that you can see goes all the way across the driver's side of the interior and into the center. Now, the infotainment screen is the middle part of this, and the system is excellent. I already showed you that you can control it with this dial in the center, this glass dial that's cool, but it's also a touchscreen. So if you'd prefer to control it that way, no problem, you can. This is the home screen, has a map and other information, which is great, and it's very intuitive to move to other parts of the infotainment system and control basically what you need. Of course, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, also standard in this car, like in most new cars. Now, there is a drawback of this infotainment system. The climate controls are integrated into it, and the function is a little bit clunky. You can make easy adjustments to the climate controls here, just in the corner of the screen by tapping. You can increase the air temperature here, for instance, pretty simple. But if you want to do more than that, it requires a few more pushes. For instance, turning on the heated seat, you got to tap this icon and then turn on the heated seat. So it's a two-step process. And if you want to change the fan speed, you actually have to go to the climate screen, press that button, and then you can adjust the fan speed from there. It complicates things a little more than you would want for some simple control adjustments. But one way this infotainment system makes up for that is the excellent camera system that this car has. You go into reverse and instantly you're greeted by a tremendously high-quality camera, much better than what Audi has. And you can see it gives you these little boxes that show how far you are from something. Green, then turning to yellow, then turning to red, which makes it very, very easy to see what you might hit and exactly what part of the car is in danger. You also have a great top-down 360 camera, as you can see, that even shows the positioning of the doors when they swing open. So you know if you're parking too close to something for your passengers to get out, you can see their door paths on the screen, which is a great idea. And there's even this 360-degree camera that's like a little helicopter hovering over the i5, showing exactly what's going on from whatever angle you want to see. That makes maneuvering in tight spaces especially easy. And there's even a car wash mode. You go into that and it gives you a top-down camera that shows where your wheels are positioned, so you can exactly line it up with a car wash, like a drive-through car wash, to make sure you're right in position. I'm not sure many people will use that, but it's another cool feature of the camera system in this car. Next, we move on to the drive modes, which, well, they're interesting. You don't have your typical sport, normal, eco in this car. Instead, well, you press the My Modes button here in the console, and it pulls up a slew of drive modes that include names like Personal and Expressive and Relax. And when you adjust and go into one of those modes, you can see it changes the ambient lighting color in the interior. It's not just changing the steering and the acceleration to be quicker in sport mode. It actually changes the mood of the car, or at least that's their hope with these My Modes that go beyond just traditional drive modes. Now, that is an interesting thing, but the most unusual My Mode is the Digital Art one. You scroll over to Digital Art, and when you tap on that, the infotainment system display is taken up by a piece of digital art that was specifically created for BMW, for the new 5 Series. There's even an audio guide that explains the digital art to you by the artist who did it, as if you were in a museum listening to an audio guide. Well, now you can be in your car listening to the BMW Digital Art audio guide. Certainly quirky. But anyway, the other notable screen on this giant curved screen panel is the gauge cluster screen directly behind the steering wheel, which has its pros and cons. One pro is it's very easy to adjust. Using this switch on the steering wheel, you can change what it's showing you, the format of its display, to exactly tailor it to what you want to see. The drawback of this gauge cluster screen, though, is it's not really good at showing you two things at once. For instance, it can't show you the music you're playing and a map of where you're going, which some rivals, including Mercedes-Benz, can do. They can give you that two-screen option right in front of your face. With that said, the heads-up display in this particular i5 helps make up for that a little bit because it can show you more stuff projected directly onto the windshield ahead of where you're looking. And next up, we move on to the backseat of the new 5 Series, the new i5, which is predictably huge. I say predictably because given the size of this car, how big it's gotten, the backseat had better be big, and it delivers. I have the front seat positioned where I would sit as someone who's tall, 6'4", and sitting back here, my knees don't even come close to touching the back of the front seat. I got headroom, I got hiproom. There's a lot of space in this car and a big, generous, comfortable backseat. Aside from that, nothing too quirky back here. You do have two USB-C ports in the center, which is obviously nice, and then you have another two USB-C ports on the backs of the front seats. You can see on driver and passenger side next to a little hook for an accessory for some device. You could install an iPad there, for instance, and keep it charged while you're looking at it as you drive along. Possibly the quirkiest thing in the backseat is that the backrest is two-tone. You can see the center headrest is black along with the upper part of the backrest, and then the rest of the seats are white, including the other two headrests. Certainly an interesting thing. You don't often see a deviated color rear headrest, but you do have that here. Aside from that, nothing particularly interesting. You do have a center armrest that folds down and also has some cupholders, and you got some climate vents back here, which is pretty much par for the course in a vehicle at this price point in this segment. And finally, we move around back in the i5, where you can see back here the blue-rimmed BMW badge has a blue ring around it to signify that this is an electric BMW as opposed to a gas-powered BMW with no blue ring. But that badge is mounted on the trunk. We open up the trunk and discover there's a pretty good amount of cargo space back here, even though this is the electric model, and so batteries probably take up some of the space. You got a good-sized trunk. It's wide, flat, deep, and there's good space in here. Decent-sized trunk, but again, it should be given that this is a pretty large-sized car. Also worth pointing out in the trunk, you do have a latch to drop down the back seats. You have two individual latches, one for each side, and it's nice to be able to unlatch the back seats from here. So if you have some large item, you can just do that and then send it right through without having to go to the seats individually and drop them down. Now, in terms of storage with this car, one thing worth pointing out, the front does not contain a storage compartment. You open up the front, you have this giant plastic BMW thing, but there's no front trunk in this car. Kind of a missed opportunity considering how much space there is up front, enough for the gasoline engine in the regular 5 Series, but no front trunk storage. Still, the rear cargo area trunk is certainly large enough for most people and most needs. All right, driving the new i5, and thus the new 5 Series, and I have to say, this car has gotten a little bit of hate on the internet for the way it looks, but like I said, every enthusiast has hated every BMW that has come out since I've been alive initially, how it looks, and then eventually it grows on you, and then 15 years from now, it'll be like, that was a cool car. So I'm getting past that. The way it drives is excellent. Now, I want to make a really important distinction here. The way it drives is excellent if you just want a nice, comfortable, good, stable, quiet, high quality car. This feels like that. As an enthusiast, I think that some people will probably be disappointed with the way it drives. It is big. It is pretty floaty. Now this isn't the M version. This isn't an M5. This isn't the i5, the M60. There are more exciting models of this car, but you can just tell the steering and handling, this is not like an E39. It's not like a 5 Series from back in the day, but I have a suspicion that the people buying these cars aren't necessarily even looking for that. The truth is, I think what they want is a comfortable, high-tech, roomy vehicle, and this is that to an excellent degree. This new 5 Series has really impressed me with the way it drives. I've been driving it around for a few days now, and it is so nice and so comfortable and so kind of waft around and relaxed. It's just a really good, solid, well-built, excellent car, as long as you're not looking for a lot of excitement. Now, people are going to say, well, BMW used to be the ultimate driving machine, the most exciting brand, and we can debate the pros and cons of BMW's latest direction all day long, but for people who just want a modern, good car with good tech, this is that. The steering is light. I mean, it's not as communicative or as quick as in some cars, not even as communicative or quick as in Teslas, which don't exactly have the quickest or best steering, but it's predictable. It's linear. It's easy. The ride quality is excellent. I mean, really, really soft, comfortable ride. The 5 Series in general is a car that has to appeal to the masses because there are a lot of masses buying this car, and this is maybe the best one they've done yet. The exception being it's just not the most enthusiast-y one they've done yet. In fact, I would hazard a guess it's probably the least enthusiast-y one. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with this platform for the M5, which I suspect will be an excellent car, but the way that this drives is just, it's sublime. I mean, it's just comfortable and quiet and nice and easy, and it's just really good. And by the way, if you accelerate hard, 355 horsepower, it's no slouch. It moves. It is a quick car, and the M60 must be like really fast, but this thing kicks you in the face. It really does go like you'd want from an electric car. People are going to say, you know, why buy this over Tesla, the charging network? And there are some real drawbacks to this car. Obviously, the range figure, even at 295 for this version, it's not an enormous amount of range, and it's a little pricey, but it does offer really great technology. I think that Tesla's tech is actually not really the best. I also find the quality of this car to be excellent. The materials, the interior, everything here is really nice, even though the driving experience may not be quite the very best that BMW has ever done or where they used to be. Overall, I think this would be a great cruiser. If I was buying an electric car and I just kind of wanted to like get some miles, like on a commute, this is a really good car for that. And of course, adaptive cruise control with, you know, driver assist tech and BMW's auto steering does a really good job. I really think your perspective on the new 5 Series is going to on exactly who you are. If you're an enthusiast, you'll be a little disappointed by this car. It's big, it's floatier, it's not the enthusiast pick. If you're a regular person who wants like a nice luxury car to commute in, which I think is the majority of 5 Series sales, and probably always has been if we're honest, I think that you'll find that this is an excellent vehicle and quite possibly the best 5 Series yet. It is certainly diverging from the enthusiast path, but for some people that's going to be a benefit. No harsh ride, no really tight steering, no compromises on size, you know, to have a smaller car with a smaller footprint. It just now feels like a luxury car and it does a good job delivering that luxury. And so that's the new 2024 BMW i5, the fully electric version of BMW's new 5 Series. Now people always complain about the styling of new BMWs when they're released, so I'm going to ignore most of that. But from the perspective of technology, interior comfort, roominess, this is a pretty impressive car. And now it's time to give the new i5 a Doug's score. And the Doug's score is here, 62 out of 100, which places the i5 near the bottom of this list of sort of rivals. It's worth pointing out, though, that basically every car on this list is either far more expensive, like the Mercedes EQS, BMW i7, or intentionally a performance car like the BMW i4 M50 or the Tesla Model 3 Performance. The i5's closest rival on this list is the Mercedes EQE, and the BMW is leagues ahead. It's better inside, nicer to drive, more comfortable, and frankly, it just feels and seems more premium. Plus, I'm sure the i5 M60 is a hoot to drive. However, even the eDrive40 model I tested is legitimately good. Not necessarily fun, but effortless, comfortable, high-tech, all-around great. It's surprising how far ahead of Mercedes BMW is here.