BMW M5 vs Mercedes E55 by Skyler Newlands
Okay kids, imagination time!!! Let’s say you’re a legendary, blood thirsty warrior about to go into battle. You’re fucking psyched! You’re gonna go kick some ass! Where’s your damn weapon, right? Hold up there killer…..
Say you have two weapons to choose from, and both can be almost equally effective in the right hands. Let’s say for the sake of argument you can choose between a huge, mean, spikey warhammer or a shiny, delicate katana, basically a four foot long razor blade. What’s more your style? Would you want to smash your opponents into meaty pulp-wafers or cut them into neat pieces? Are you into the more animalistic experience of swinging blindly at anything that moves or would you be more interested in making art of the carnage? Ahhh decisions decisions.
Now fast forward 600 years to the blood-soaked streets of New Jersey and we face a similar question in choosing between the brutal torque monster that is the Mercedes E55 or BMW’s F1 car with 4 doors, the M5.
I’ve had the priveledge of driving both cars, and they both deliver completely different driving experiences. Mash the throttle in the E55 and all hell breaks loose, the car lunges forward as if Satan himself was giving you a push start and 500 plus pounds of torque rip you forward at only 2000 rpm, practically idle speed. But just like swinging that huge mean warhammer, you’d better hope you don’t have to make any corrections mid-surge, because she doesn’t exactly handle, at all.
The M5 is a completely different experience. Drunk off horsepower and revs, the M car barely has any torque to speak of, a paltry 384 pounds at 6,000rpm. Now you could be saying, “Skyler, you’re a deranged bastard, 384 is plenty”, and if I wasn’t so high I might agree with you. But I am and when we’re talking about supercars here, so 384 is a fucking sin.
The M5’s specs are something you might see in Juan Pablo Montoya’s old ride, a 5.0 liter V10 with 10 individual throttle butterflies (!!!!!), an 8,400rpm redline and a completely mental 7 speed SMG gearbox. No carmaker has ever collected the sheer audacity required to put out a car with such a nutty spec list, let alone having the cojones to slap such a drivetrain in a sedan. Like the aforementioned katana, the M5 is an angry surgeon’s tool. It will do absolutely anything you tell it to do, and can be incredibly powerful in the right hands, but only in the right hands. If you’re not a proper driver but you have the means, just grab yourself any Merc AMG and mash the throttle every time you have something to prove. BMW boasts that their cars are the ultimate driving machines, and in the case of the M5, they’re actually right.
Step into the M5 and you’re surrounded by plush leather, a million buttons and swtiches, a fancy “start” button and a heads up display on the windshield that will tell you anything from current speed and RPM to what’s on the radio. The steering wheel must have been designed by gods, because its perfect, and the driver’s seat is so adjustable that the top half of the seatback bends independently of the bottom half.
Active side bolsters actually move to grip you in sharp corners where G forces might force you to slide sideways in your seat, a wild innovation that I’ve never seen before and am now addicted to. It evokes giggles from everyone experiencing it for the first time. There are driver adjustable settings for the firmness of the suspension, the activity of the Electronic M Differential, the power output of the car, the traction control, you get the point. Thing is, unless you switch these settings to EXACTLY your style of driving, you’ll never get your money’s worth. This car DEMANDS that you take control and tell it exactly what to do every second, especially in the case of the transmission.
The auto mode just plain sucks, seven gears is just too much to handle for the space-age onboard computer, and the gearshifts are awkward, often, and clunky. However, in manual mode at its snappiest setting, the car can be smoother than any six-speed. Just like an old Japanese katana, unless you’ve got the skills to pay the bills, you probably don’t belong in an M5, just cop yourself a much simpler, much more torquey, and significantly more brainless Merc AMG.
In summary, if you’re a modern-day road warrior looking to drop a metric ton of cash on one of these insane weapons of war, ask yourself; do you have the skills to handle the M5? or will you just bite the bullet and swing away with the awesome power of the Merc E55? The choice is ultimately yours, but I’d probably rather have some skills in my kills.
