BMW i5 Touring Review 2025

Electric cars can open brave new worlds for their manufacturers. Unburdened by considerations of packaging space-inefficient combustion engines and gearboxes into designs, palatial interiors are possible, enveloped within daringly styled and proportioned bodywork. Given how radical the BMW i3 looked back in 2013 it’s a shame that today’s BMW i5 Touring looks so traditional.

So, what’s happened to create this seemingly retrograde shift for the upmarket German brand? In fairness, it’s not for a corporate want of trying. After all, both the i3 and the BMW i8 sports coupe launch around the same time heralded a significant statement of intent as the company entered its electric era — notwithstanding that the i8 was a plug-in hybrid.

Car buyers’ collective conservatism is the key reason. Once early EV adopters had their fill of early, battery-powered cars, core consumers — already reluctant to switch to electric cars anyway — viewed these silent newcomers as weird-looking virtue signals and stuck with what they knew.

Gradually, manufacturers accepted it was too soon to flip the notion of what a car could be completely on its head, making the next wave of battery-powered appear more conventional, often with necessary cost-savings requiring the hidden parts of the vehicle structure to accommodate electric, PHEV and combustion engine options.

Hence why the petrol- and plug-in hybrid-propelled BMW 5 Series Touring — which goes toe-to-toe with the Audi A6 Avant and Mercedes E-Class Estate — and its electric-only i5 Touring sibling look all but identical to each other, inside and out.

Highlighting how no company with skin in this game is quite sure which is the right approach during these years of unprecedented change, those aforementioned BMW rivals have each taken wildly differing methods with their i5 Touring electric estate car alternatives.

With a platform and bodywork not shared with its petrol- and diesel- namesakes is the Audi A6 Avant e-tron, while Mercedes sells the EQ… Oh, it doesn’t. Its not-really-comparable Mercedes EQE SUV is as near as it looks like we’ll get to an electric estate wearing the three-pointed star badge.

Regardless of how they’re powered and the degree to which their underpinnings have to perform multiple duties, BMW’s knowhow when it comes to building desirable cars that manage to be both comfortable and agile enough to sate keen drivers’ need is undiminished.

It’s been building estates for the best part of 40 years now, so despite the BMW i5 Touring’s packaging constraints it’s amply spacious for five adults, while its load-lugging credentials make it one of the most capacious wagons on sale.

With its 40/20/40 split-folding rear seats in use the i5 Touring can swallow 570 litres of cargo giving it a 68-litre advantage over the A6 Avant e-tron. Once tipped forwards to maximise the available space the BMW will accept a 1700-litre load, rather embarrassing the Audi’s 1422-litre tally. Note that the combustion-engined BMW 5 Series Touring is no roomier than the i5.

Not that the BMW i5 Touring’s the most commodious large electric estate available — that honour goes to the Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer, curiously unrelated to the A6 Avant e-tron despite being from the same manufacturing group. The VW provides a 605-litre load bay with the back seats in use and 1948 litres when they’re folded, as well as being a smidge over £11,000 less expensive than the BMW when considering versions with comparable power.

Talking of which there are two electric drive system to choose between for the BMW i5 Touring, both using a single-speed automatic transmission and an 81.2kWh battery pack located beneath the floor.

• i5 eDrive40 Touring — single-motor rear-wheel drive, 340PS, 400Nm torque, 120mph top speed, 6.1-second 0-62mph, 309-370-mile WLTP Combined cycle range
• i5 M60 xDrive Touring — twin-motor all-wheel drive, 601PS, 795Nm torque, 143mph top speed, 3.9-second 0-62mph, 285-321-mile WLTP Combined cycle range

Recharging the i5 Touring’s battery using an 11kW AC connection needs 8 hours 30 minutes for a flat-to-full zap-up. BMW doesn’t quote a time for the more common 7.4kW domestic wallbox connection used at most UK residential addresses but expect to add three to four more hours of hook-up time.

Connected to a sufficiently powerful DC ultra-rapid public charger, the BMW can manage an energy flow rate of 205kW, resulting in a 10%-80% replenishment in just 30 minutes.

Mirroring the BMW i5 Saloon range, four trim levels are sold in Touring form with the eDrive40 motor available in Sport Edition, M Sport and M Sport Pro guises, while the M60 xDrive is essentially a trim level in its own right. That’s also as near as the company makes to an electric BMW M5 Touring.

Each is generously equipped with a wide suite of optional upgrades available to tailor specifications to your taste — useful to know if you fancy the head-up display system, alloy wheels up to 21 inches in size, Matrix LED headlights or the BMW Iconic Glow contour lighting around the edges of the front grille.

All i5 Tourings feature BMW’s minimalist ideology when it comes to dashboard design. There are few physical buttons, which we don’t like, although BMW claws some marks back thanks to its rotary iDrive controller. That can be used as an alternative to dabbing your fingers all over the 14.9-inch multimedia touchscreen which sits alongside a 12.3-inch instrumentation screen within a single, curved panel.

Order books for the BMW i5 Touring opened in spring 2024 with customer deliveries already well underway. Prices start at £69,995 for the BMW i5 eDrive40 Sport Edition Touring, peaking at £100,005 for the BMW i5 M60 xDrive Touring.

Keep this page bookmarked for our forthcoming comprehensively detailed full BMW i5 Touring review.