This isn’t a full M car but an M Performance car of the kind we’re familiar with, aiming to be a quick daily driver, with four-wheel drive to cope with its oomph and 48V mild hybridisation to ease its fuel use. What an old-fashioned thrill it is to open a spec sheet and find the ratios for an eight-speed automatic gearbox. Is it 2007? Only the minor electric boost would suggest otherwise from a skim of the rest of the numbers.
There’s a ‘Twinpower Turbo’ engine, with direct injection and four valves per head, longitudinally mounted – albeit much cleaner than an E90’s equivalent, of course. And it's very powerful: this family saloon makes 437bhp and 428lb ft of torque, the onrush of competing electric power outputs presumably having threatened to make an ordinary 3.0-litre’s grunt look very underwhelming.
So it is that a car with “high levels of comfort in everyday use and over long distance journeys” is also one that can hit 62mph in 4.1sec and has to be limited to 155mph. And this is still a dreamy engine by today’s standards: smooth at any speed, a little raspy at the top but broadly responsive and satisfying right through the range. The mild hybridisation helps to shorten any low-speed throttle delay as the single, twin-scroll turbocharger spools.
Overall it will do 34-37mpg, but I think you will exceed that if you spend a lot of time on motorways. In more general driving, you can sense the gearbox keeping as high a gear as possible to minimise the amount of fuel the B58 straight six uses. Gently accelerating from, say, a town into a national speed limit zone, it doesn’t want to shift down from high gears unless you really urge it to.
