C O V E R     S T O R Y

Every Terminator movie has a scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets hit with everything the enemy has.  His skin and human attachments rip off, revealing the glowering, gleaming metal underneath.  Imagine that happening to a car, and that's how the new BMW 5 series looks like—as if the attractively beady-eyed countenance of the old 5 gets blown off and out comes The Cyborg.  The angry eyebrows of the front headlamp clusters lead to a pronounced nose section and sharply creased flanks.  The shutlines are all trapezoids and the rear continues the bulky, angular theme.

The 5 is an assault on the senses that takes some getting used to.  Its personality is strong but pleasantly so.  The inside is just as powerful, with strong shapes assuaged by the best possible material choices.  The door panels, for instance, feature sharp cuts of soft-touch plastics interspersed with the aluminum door pull and brown leather panel.  Gauges are elegant, easy-to-read affairs, with no electronic-lighting gimmickry.  One neat touch is the cruise-control indicator, a small white notch that rotates into place around the rim of the speedometer to show the preset speed.

The most prominent interior feature is the infamous iDrive system.  Audio settings, environmental controls and information are called up when you twist or push the big knob on the center console. 

BMW Philippines Communications Director Lito German compared the iDrive to the personalization capabilities of a mobile phone.  Setting up one's preferences on a new mobile will drive you mad the first few days you use it, but after that, you pretty much just leave it alone because it's exactly the way you want it. That made perfect sense to us.  Do you want Maximum Aircon to mean a cool breeze, or a blast from the Arctic?  You can set it once on the iDrive's menu, and it'll behave that way next time you punch that Max button.  Do you want the doors to lock when you start the car, when you go faster than 5 km/h, or only when you push the lock button?  Trivial matters, perhaps, but all of these add up to having everything just the way you want it.

This "iDrive light" removes some of the customization options available on the bigger 7 such as adjustment of suspension settings.  Not that we really missed that.  One cool feature is the service indicator telling you just how many km you have left on your engine oil, filters and brake pads.  Take a lot of high-speed runs and you will see the brake pad indicator quickly report diminishing life.  The iDrive, like so much on this car, is geared towards the driver, but it will amuse the front passenger, particularly women, no end.  Better than a Gameboy on a long trip.

Sitting in a 5 is memorable enough even before you turn the key.  But the real experience begins when you start her up.  Steering wheel and seat, which have retracted for ingress, reposition themselves to your preferred position. Everything needed for driving is power-adjustable and can be saved in a preset memory; even the headrests move up and down via motors.

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