BMW i5 Launch.

Wow, cyborgs or robots for 10 please, Bob.

I think it’s pretty awful design-wise.

Just because it could have been worse doesn’t make it an elegant or cohesive bit of penmanship on the part of whichever committee of beards groupthought it into being.

I saw an i pace and a Merc equivalent coming back from the hospital today, the Merc electric thing is uglier, bigger and blinged into the upper atmosphere. Yuk.

I saw the new i5 at FoS and at best it is “meh”. It’s curiously boxy and the styling details are distinctly heavy-handed. The outgoing car (something of a looker by saloon standards) is a supermodel by comparison.

BMW needs to fire its design team pronto.

They've also just facelifted the X5 and shoved a stupid gigantic grille on it.

Still, the Vision Neue Klasse looks reasonably ok albeit the back end reminds me of the Alfa 164 and 166., so ripped off a car nearly 40 or nearly 30 years old!

I still wouldn’t choose one, but that really is good value.

I'll see if the pull is strong enough to drag me away from Tax Returns!

Harry roasted it. His list of likes was one, his list of dislikes was the rest of the video.

Aside from griping about cheap switchgear (and I assume Thomas has the journalistic rights to “#capacitivebullshit” otherwise Harry would have used it) it was largely a complaint about the electric model. Short range, massive M60 price tag and weight were the takeaways for me. The petrol ones being 600+kgs lighter was an eye opener: that’s six of me before I get in! Oh yeah and the modes stuff and billion screen interfaces was another issue: I think manufacturers have tried to attract Tesla fan boys/girls with this one-screen-does-it-all shite without stopping to consider that Tesla owners are actually a species in their own right and their preferences should be avoided by other manufacturers.

BMW really have lost their way in many respects. I'd like to know who is pushing the current agenda of ugly, poorly made, high price, thinking they are on to a winner. The only reason I still have the M5 is that BMW make nothing I want to replace it with and I am sure there will be lots of other 5 series owners who feel the same. The M3 and M4 are extremely capable cars but the front end and some other styling cues really don't excite me.

I guess that manufacturers are going to have to make ICE cars even more expensive for two reasons. (1) to make EV's look slightly less crap value, but more importantly is probably (2) to pay the huge fines per vehicle that governments seem set to make them pay for having the audacity to sell vars that people want rather than the cars that people are told to buy.

As said above, as a 5 series a £70k 520i seems almost as outrageous as a £100k i5. It's a mass-built mid range exec for heavens sake, not a low volume supercar.

Clarkson in the Sunday Times yesterday was on point here.

He wrote "I like to think our [motoring journalists'] constant ability to be unimpressed drove carmakers to strive for a level of perfection that only Kristen Scott Thomas can understand. And I think that about 10 years ago they achieved "peak car". The turbo lag really had gone. The panel gaps were invisible. The electrics were tried and tested. And for the most part, they'd given up with flappy paddle double-clutch gearboxes and gone back to traditional autos. Which had become smooth, seamless, fast and light.

And then came along the world's net zero kumbaya governments that wanted cars to be uncrashable and produce fewer emissions than a single grain of kale. Which meant carmakers had to abandon everything they'd learnt over the previous hundred years.

It's not as if they've had to go back to a time when the controls were on the outside and there were running boards. But backwards they have most definitely gone. I'd say the electric and hybrid cars of today are probably as good as proper cars were in 1986. And as a motoring journalist that makes my teeth itch".

List price is £50k now and discounts are back, so not a massive increase.  

Forgot about the ‘faux leather’ / pleather / vinyl!   You can still have his and hers for the price of an i5….