By Somnath Chatterjee
New Delhi, India
January, 2021
Performance SUVs might be the biggest oxymoron but they do make sense considering our multi-tasking lives. A super car is best for social media and taking it out requires an entourage along with the upkeep of a Faberge egg. You keep it in a garage with only a handful of roads being good enough to take your low-slung super car. However with a performance SUV you take it out every day while having more opportunities to drive it and actually access its full potential. You also do not need to have the tow-truck or your chiropractor’s number on your speed dial.
And that brings us to the new BMW X5 M Competition. This is, we feel, currently one of the best performance SUVs on the market. Well priced, not as vulgar looking or fake as some of the ‘other’ super SUVs while being true to what it can do. The X5 M Competition is the faster version of an already fast car with so many M sport toppings that it is a completely different recipe from the usual X5.
BMW M is known for making great sports cars but the same magic dust has been sprinkled in the X5 M. The Competition moniker adds further naughtiness to this package. The heart of the matter is the engine and it is a marvelous V8 with displacing 4.4 litres along with having two turbochargers in case it is not enough. The end result is a SUV that gives many supercars a bloody nose. The noise is also a V8 gargle that is heard a mile away when properly provoked though it can be silenced when you want it to be via the exhaust settings but we do not see any reason why you would not want to hear that V8 music all of the time! The power count is ridiculous at 625hp while it can do 0-100km/h in 3.8 seconds. You may as well tear apart any known physics rulebook as the X5 M Competition rips it to shreds.
Along with the engine, there is a lot of complex electronics and trickery done here. It is no longer just a BMW X5 as the M division has nearly changed it to an altogether new car. You have gigantic tyres and wheels with equally big brakes along with stiffer suspension plus an amount of computing power to make NASA proud. You can tune everything from how ferocious the gear changes would be to how much V8 noise your ears can take along with the ridiculous athleticism, which it demonstrates. It is less of an SUV and more of a raised M5 sports sedan on stilts.
But does it make sense? Yes, it does because you can take your 600 plus bhp car to places your average sports car will not go. You can discover new roads and enjoy that V8 even more. It gives freedom to enjoy performance and that’s what you want after forking out all those crores.
In case of the X5 M Competition though it is not too many crores as it is just shy of Rs 2 crore. Now it may seem like a heap of money to throw at a X5 but think of it along the lines that it is one crore cheaper than a Lamborghini Urus plus having more space along with looking a bit more aggressive. The gaping air intakes are massive to feed air in and it scares away other cars while the design reeks of a menacing stance. There is no doubt that the X5 M Competition is a cool car and it makes SUVs even more of a dominant force in the performance car genre.
