BMW i5 Touring review

For about three generations of 5 Series cabin, it felt like BMW reached peak ergonomics and left it well alone. In the i5, those days are over, as you probably read in our review of the saloon version. This is a much less sober place to be, more about surprise and delight. It may woo younger buyers into a 5 Series. It will almost certainly baffle some of the 5 Series faithful. In many areas, it’s certainly flawed.

You’ll make up your own mind on the seaside neon ambient lighting inlaid into the dash, which combines with the familiar BMW ‘curved display’ to give the i5 the nighttime ambience of Blackpool on New Year’s Eve. The build quality of our test cars was exemplary, as you’d hope, though one or two of the textured trim fillets are an acquired taste.

Where BMW’s let itself down is in the quest for minimalism. What was once an easy seat adjustment is now buried in the touchscreen, shortcutted via a touch-sensitive seat menu button on the door that’s easy to use… if you were born with triple-jointed wrists.

It’s needlessly fiddly to tweak the direction of heater airflow, and because the vents have been engineered out of view the open-close function is a touch-sensitive panel job. Who signed that off? The glossy panel around the iDrive clickwheel is impossible to use on a bright day, and is rendered a smeary mess immediately after your hapless passenger has been enlisted to help delve into the sub menus. BMW’s still not seen sense with the main menu screen though: it’s a mass of blue tiled icons on a blue background. Who thought that was a good idea?

But can it still ‘wagon’ properly?

Yes. The boot is a commodious shape with a wide loading sill and BMW is rightly proud of the fact that the various powertrain options and suspension set-ups offering in the Touring don’t impinge its boot space, which is 570 litres in five-seater mode and 1,700 litres with the rear seat backs folded down; a spring-loaded doddle.

Under the boot floor there’s stowage for a charging cable and room to stow the usual cumbersome load bay cover. An electric tailgate is standard, though BMW wagon fans of yore will bemoan the loss of the novel split tailgate which allowed owners to open the rear glass without having to stand around watching their nails grow while the tailgate motors up and down.

BMW says it did lots of analysis and owners weren’t using the heavy, complicated-to-make split tail mechanism, so it’s been binned. We’ll miss it. You too? Buy a 3 Series Touring while you still can…