The steering in the 550i is by far its greatest downfall. And it’s not super at being sporty, either, being less sure-footed than the 3-series and exhibiting a little wheel shudder at the limit when road surfaces aren’t glassy. Yes, the new dynamic suspension does a good job of managing road scars-BMW touts that it can appropriately adjust rear-wheel damping in time to handle a pothole the front wheel has just hit-but it doesn’t deliver the wafty ride you might expect in a Lexus. Thanks to active roll stabilization, the 550i remains more or less flat during vigorous cornering, but its weight gain of more than 300 pounds over the last 550i is undoubtedly felt. The differences among the settings are mostly linear, with each setting sportier than the last, and they all do a fine job of managing the 550i.
#2011 BMW 550I F10 IVISIBLE BRA DRIVER#
Although the discerning driver (or hopeless tinkerer) can fine-tune these through iDrive, it’s easiest to leave the system in one of its four main settings: comfort, normal, sport, and sport plus. It’s a set of preferences, controlled with center-console buttons or through the iDrive interface, for most of the car’s driving characteristics, from ride to throttle response to handling. When kitted as both our cars were, with the $2700 Dynamic Handling package and $2200 Sport package, the 550i experience can be tailored using the capo di tutti capi -or “boss of all bosses,” as the Italian mobsters used to say-a system called adaptive drive. What this 550i does differently from the old is allow the driver to adjust suspension settings rather than be forced to accept a near-flawlessly calibrated balance of luxury and sport out of the box. There’s no way to describe the driving experience in this car without addressing the network of supercomputers, which are mostly part of options packages, and its implications. For comparison, the 2011 automatic trumped the significantly lighter last-gen 550i by 0.4 second to 60 mph, and it bests the current rear-drive 750i by the same amount.
#2011 BMW 550I F10 IVISIBLE BRA MANUAL#
The manual-equipped car, on the other hand, is not afraid to speak up, growing louder as you near redline.Īt the test track, the autobox edged out the manual by 0.3 second in the sprint to 60 mph, at a mere 4.8 seconds-the manual’s wider gearing and trickiness at launch account for the difference-but it was a draw by the time they passed the quarter-mile, with both cars arriving in 13.1 seconds at a swift 109 mph. Power comes from BMW’s twin-turbocharged, direct-injected 4.4-liter V-8, and delivery of the 400 hp and 450 lb-ft of torque is so smooth and quiet when hooked to the new ZF eight-speed automatic (a no-cost option) that you’ll need to have the radio off and your lead foot on to hear so much as a growl from the exhaust. And that’s no bad thing, especially if luxury is atop your priorities list. Even though it doesn’t offer the cavernous accommodations of the 7-series with which it shares some architecture, the 550i is in most other ways a smaller 7-series. The 550i starts at $60,575 (with options, our automatic test car topped $75,000 and the manual neared $70,000, but more on that later), reaffirming its place as a car for the well-to-do. But since that model went out of production in 2003, BMW has armed itself to the teeth in the horsepower wars, and these specs now describe a run-of-the-mill 550i. Describing a BMW 5-series with rear-wheel drive and about 400 hp from a V-8 conjures a specific memory for most car enthusiasts: the legendary E39 M5.
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