2000 BMW X5: Grasp of None

From the April 2000 issue of Car and Driver.

Our $55,315 Titanium Silver Metallic BMW X5 certainly looked the part of a means­-business sport-utility vehicle­—square-shouldered, enormous 19- inch tires jamming the wheel wells, the prominent BMW twin-kidney grille. And as regular readers know, we like BMWs.

But early comments from staffers who drove this brand-new vehicle elicited very un-BMW-like, one-­word adjectives—such as jerky, jumpy, and jiggly. It sounded as if we were naming the cast of the “Seven Dysfunctional Dwarves.”

Those comments were warranted especially on southern Michigan’s grim washboard roads, where our X5, equipped with the $2470 Sport package, provided a downright pun­ishing ride. Several of us wondered if somehow the tires had been inflated to, say, 60 psi. (They hadn’t.) We wondered why the steering had such a stiff, slow, nonlinear feel. We wondered why the drive-by-wire throttle, entirely acceptable with this engine in the 540i sedan, had such an abrupt tip-in.

Then we thought: Hey, BMWs, pre­sumably even its sport-utility vehicle (called by BMW a “sports-activity vehicle,” for reasons that will become clear shortly), are road warriors, so let’s take a road trip!

Four days and more than 2500 miles later, our first-impression complaints remained and were joined by a handful of additional shortcomings, although there were just as many nearly stellar achieve­ments, because many of the good things about the X5 become evident with seat time. Suffice it to say that the X5, which gamely attempts to be all things to all drivers, isn’t.

First, the good stuff.

The build quality of the unibody X5, manufactured exclusively in the BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is on par with anything the company makes. Fit and finish was excellent. The X5 was drum tight on the roughest pavement and gave the impression it would still be so 75,000 miles down the road.

Similarly, there’s little to fault about the X5’s interior. Wood trim is used liberally on the doors, dash, and console. The leather used on the seating surfaces, door panels, steering wheel, and shift knob is top quality. The legible white-on-black instru­ments are properly framed through the top half of the steering wheel, which, incidentally, is fitted with buttons on the left side of the hub that control the stereo and ears on the right side that regulate the cruise con­trol. There’s a useful, unobtrusive trip computer, an excellent 10-speaker stereo, and three memory settings that store seat, seatbelt-height, steering-wheel, and outside-mirror positions.

Although the rear seats are a bit upright and thinly padded, the twin front bucket sport seats are superb. The driver’s seat has an eight-way power adjustment; the passenger seat is six-way adjustable. That the driver’s seat remained comfortable after a 24-hour stint behind the wheel is a significant achievement on BMW’s part. Nice, too, is a huge dead pedal for the driver’s left foot. As you would expect, safety features abound, including dual front and front side airbags, as well as the inflatable, sausage-shaped Head Protection System. Door-mounted rear side airbags are optional. Perhaps the most serious complaint about the passenger compartment is a minor one: The console-mounted twin cup holders can handle two cans but could not take two medium-size cups that flared at the top without tipping one of them off to the side.

Move to the rear, though, and our complaints get a bit more severe. With the 60/40 rear seats in place, luggage capacity is a modest 16 cubic feet—the same as in a Hyundai Accent. If you want your cargo covered, capacity is reduced even more by a flimsy sliding plastic cover.

Beneath the cargo floor is, at least, a full-size spare tire—although it was an 18-inch Michelin in our X5 that was shod with the 19-inch Bridgestones that come with the Sport package. The cargo door is a two-piece unit; the top section raises, and once it’s up, you manually engage a switch (impossible to find at night unless you know where it’s located) that releases the tailgate.

On the road, the X5 seemed most at home on smooth pavement at super-legal speeds. Whether it’s in the 540i or the X5, the 282-hp, 4.4-liter V-8 is a gutsy, sophis­ticated engine. The VANOS variable valve timing is seamless and transparent. Mated to the five-speed automatic ZF transmis­sion, the powertrain is well-matched, downshifting intuitively when needed, upshifting without drama. It has the Steptronic feature that allows you to shift for yourself, but to some of us, it seemed more a novelty than an enhancement.

As mentioned previously, throttle tip-­in from a standing start demands a very light touch on the accelerator—any more pedal pressure and you lurch. Once under way, though, throttle feel is fine.

Not so with the variable-assist rack-­and-pinion steering, which is tiresomely stiff at slow speeds. Although the X5 tracks straight and true with little correc­tion required on the interstate, it did not have the linear, precise feel we’ve come to know and love from other BMWs.

The X5 has all-wheel drive, with power delivered through a transfer case that nom­inally sends 38 percent of the torque to the front, 62 percent to the rear, unless other­wise advised by the traction-control system. There is no low-range gearing, and instead of a limited-slip or locking differ­ential, the X5 has Automatic Differential Braking, a traction-control-type system that sends power to the wheels that have grip by individually braking the wheels that don’t. These systems tend to cook the brakes in prolonged low-traction slogging.

The suspension that makes the X5 handle like a vehicle set lower than its 67.2-inch height, and lighter than its 4933-pound weight, makes for a jarring ride on all but the smoothest blacktop. Even con­crete highways in good repair have expan­sion joints, and the X5 finds every one of them. For this reason, we’d be tempted to pass on the Sport package—thus saving $2470 but missing out on those cool-­looking 19-inch tires and wheels—if it meant a smoother ride.

And the X5 does go around corners with authority. The big four-wheel disc brakes with anti-lock are excellent (70 mph to 0 takes a sports-car-like 167 feet) and, along with traction control, are stan­dard. The X5 circled the skidpad at 0.79 g, compared with 0.74 g for the Mercedes-­Benz ML55 AMG we tested in December 1999. The X5 wasn’t quite as quick in acceleration—a 15.4-second quarter-mile at 89 mph, compared with the ML55’s 15.3 seconds at 92 mph—but considering the X5 gives up 60 hp to the ML55’s 342-hp, 5.4-liter V-8, it’s respectable. Their curb weights are close, but their prices aren’t—our X5 listed for $55,315, about $10,000 less than the ML55.

It’s possible to find a very nice X5 for less than ours cost, but don’t expect to see many at the $49,970 base price (you could hold out for the upcoming six-cylinder X5, expected to start at about 40K). Besides the aforementioned $2470 Sport package, which included the big tires and wheels and a sport suspension with firmer shocks, springs, and anti-roll bars, our tester had a power glass sunroof ($1050), xenon headlights ($500), tinted windows ($275), an upgraded stereo with a CD player ($200), and an $850 Activity package, which included heated front seats and headlamp washers.

Standard stuff includes Hill Descent Control (like traction control for engine braking, it helps you creep down steep hills, braking to maintain about 6 mph), Dynamic Stability Control (combines ABS and traction control with info gath­ered by yaw, steering-angle, acceleration, and brake-pedal sensors), and Dynamic Brake Control (which “reinforces the driver’s pedal effort in emergency braking”).

All that could not, however, make our X5 work well in the snow, thanks mostly, we suspect, to the massive Bridgestone Turanza radials. Customers who buy a Sport-package-equipped X5 thinking they can play mountain goat on slick roads will be disappointed, as snow-covered roads, both around our Ann Arbor home office and on 150 miles of Illinois interstate, had us wishing for a more sure-footed snow vehicle, such as almost any front-wheel­-drive sedan on the market. The traction control does what it can, but if the tires aren’t getting traction, you’re slipping and sliding.

Brief off-road stints suggested that the X5 was not entirely at home there, either, despite adequate ground clearance and a tight turning circle. But again, the absence of low-range gearing and those great big Bridgestones are enough to keep us clear of the wilderness.

So what, then, are we to make of BMW’s new X5? Great looks, a nearly flawless interior, a commendable power­train, and exceptional build quality, com­bined with a rough ride, limited cargo capacity, and marginal snow and off-road capabilities.

If you want a sport-utility vehicle that emphasizes utility, we’d recommend a Mercedes ML430 or a Jeep Grand Cher­okee. If you lean more toward the “sport,” the BMW 540i station wagon holds more than the X5 and performs much better on the road.

Still, we predict the X5 will be a major sales success. And that’s fine, as long as customers acknowledge its limitations. But for the next 2500-mile long-weekend trip, we’ll be driving something else.

Counterpoint

Although sport-utilities and sports sedans have about as much in common as giraffes and gazelles, I have to admit that the X5 does the best job yet of blurring the boundary between the two species. True, this rig is chubby for a unibody, and it’s afflicted with the same traits that render all SUVs clumsy: a high ground clearance and a high center of gravity. Nevertheless, with the Sport package it’s arguably the most nimble SUV yet offered, it stops quicker than a lot of passenger cars, and there’s prodi­gious torque to offset its porcine mass. And if the Sport-package ride is gnarly on Michigan roads, well, all the more reason to move to California. —Tony Swan

BMW promised us the X5 would set new dynamic standards for SUVs. Sure enough, equipped with the optional Sport package, the X5 delivers cornering and braking grip far superior to any other SUV we’ve tested. Sadly, this adhesion comes with a brittle ride—one that is much less com­pliant than even an M5’s, or any other SUV’s that I can recall. Perhaps this is the price for making a 4933-pound machine with a high center of gravity stick like a BMW. Throw in numb steering and less cargo capacity than in a 5-series wagon, and the X5 takes the SUV concept in a direction I don’t under­stand. —Csaba Csere

BMW always makes sure its offering in every car category is the driver’s car of the bunch. And it rarely lets us down. The X5 doesn’t wallow through turns, sit on its rear when accelerating, or burn its brakes after numerous stops. So I’d have to say that among luxury utes, the X5 is the most sat­isfying to drive. But I still wouldn’t buy one, since it has less interior room than a 540i wagon and rides much rougher. What gives? It’s as though BMW concentrated too hard on the sport part and forgot about utility. The profit margin rung up by sport-­utes was way too much for relatively small BMW to pass up, but I’d rather see a more useful package. —Larry Webster