Pops' Rants: The BMW M5 Competition Package Is a Useless Abomination

TopSpeed

By Alex Oagana

Published May 4, 2018

Stop buying powerful but extremely heavy sedans!

The BMW M5 is an abomination. There, I finally said it. If you're a diehard fan, you can now have an aneurysm, take a deep breath, and continue reading. Or you can yell "you know nothing" and go complain on your crappy BMW forums. Because that's what true BMW fans do. Either way, the M5 sucks, and I'm going to explain why because it's way too hot outside to go for a bike ride.

So we have the 5 Series, a cool sedan that offers plenty of room for five people, a decent trunk, and solid power with good fuel economy with most drivetrains available. It has loads of great tech too, including enough drive assist features to almost drive itself. It's comfortable for long trips, and it's powerful and fast enough to get you from one state to another without boring you to death.

Then we have the M5, with has almost 600 horsepower. Wow, that's as much as a modern supercar. Pretty cool right? Well, no! The M5 is indeed more powerful than the 5 Series, but it's also really heavy. It tips the scales at more than 4,000 pounds, which is almost as much as a Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck. It has a stiffer suspension and sports seats, both of which aren't exactly comfortable. It's a car you have to live with on a daily basis, so it makes quite a difference if you look at it objectively. It's not a sports car for weekend fun.

A midsize sedan is usually heavy, but it's also comfortable. It's why the midsize sedan was invented, to give drivers a spacious, comfy car for longer trips. And then they invented the premium features to add status to a vehicle that can be used as a daily driver. The M5 takes away all of that. Seriously now, why would buy a heavy four-door with 600 horsepower and use it as a sports car? Why not buy a sports car with less power but with a better power-to-weight ratio? Oh, you need four doors and seating for five? Also buy a sedan then. The M5 is expensive enough to fit a sports car and a premium sedan in the same sticker. They won't have BMW badges, but why pay for a logo?

Which brings me to BMW's latest contraption, the M5 Competition Package. It's pretty much an M5 with a slightly more powerful engine. You basically pay the price of a used Mazda Miata to get an extra 25 horsepower and 37 pound-feet of torque. Why? Well, so you can have a heavy sedan with 616 horsepower. It's BMW's ambition to put the M5 above the Mercedes-AMG E63 S and make it a bit quicker. It obviously makes sense since we're driving sedans well in excess and 150 mph on a regular basis and we also race other drivers at every stop light. I'm being ironic, yes.

But I'm dead serious when I say that for the ridiculous price of an M5 Competition Package, that's around $110,000, you can choose between a wide selection of full-fledged sports cars and grand tourers. You can get a Chevy Corvette Stingray or even a Corvette Z06. The F-Type also fits into this budget, and you still save a few tens of thousands of dollars. Or, just go with the Shelby GT350 or the upcoming GT500 for some proper muscle action at the track. Into racing? Well, how about the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. I know they're hard to get, but an M5 budget is more than enough to buy one at silly dealer premiums.

And best of all, you need just a few grand more above the price of the M5 Competition Package to buy both a Corvette Stingray and a BMW 5 Series. So you'll have a solid sports car and a comfortable premium sedan for those long family trips. Can't get a better deal than that if you're set on owning a midsize BMW.