Then there’s a Comfort Plus pack, a £3350 combination of heated rear as well as front seats, ventilated front seats and, one of my favourite things on cooler mornings, a heated steering wheel.
That brings the total on-the-road cost of this car to £116,060, but if you didn’t spec all of that, I don’t think you’d feel like you’d missed out: the lush upholstery, silvery interior highlights and 20in wheels all come as standard.
Throw in the broad colour range too, and, well, it turns out that a £100k car isn’t exactly poverty spec, unsurprisingly.
Some of our testers say they prefer the lesser i5s to this all-singing, all-dancing* (*may not sing or dance) top-spec M60 model, owing to their lighter weight and what to them feels like a more compliant ride. I can understand that, and although I haven’t spent much time in various 5s, when I drove a couple of i7s I came away from them feeling the same way.
But I have very quickly got into the i5 M60’s groove, and it doesn’t feel like it’s short-changing me on comfort.
At some point I’d like to try a back-to-back test with an M40, but still, while it’s for very clear reasons not as absorbent as the Defender I rolled around in before, the BMW casts surface imperfections aside well enough, plus it comes with the advantage of a much smaller frontal area and a considerably lower centre of gravity, making it a much more dynamic road car.
