The 5-Series vs E-Class test used to be the big exec saloon prize fight. Who’s had the best rethink for the electric era?
WORDS TOM FORD
There was a time not so long ago when BMW really pushed boundaries, failed spectacularly to play it safe, embraced innovation hard enough to make bones creak. But back then it wasn’t an exercise to see who could make the ugliest front end – the i3 was so far ahead of the game it had packed up and gone home before others caught up. The i8 was a hybrid sports car so experimental it had customers searching for an appropriate safe word. But things have changed. Where the new BMW 5-Series now has an electric version – the i5 – this G60 shares a platform with internally combusted brethren, which invites inevitable compromise. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has produced a bespoke architecture that intends to make best use of electric motivation – the EQE is a Day One electrified car. So where Merc seems to have doubled down on EVs, BMW looks like it has started hedging bets. But all is not as it seems.
Firstly, the BMW is better looking. Yes, that may be the reaction of a conservative mind, but next to the egg-shaped pebble of the EQE, the BMW has a lot more form and texture. Traditional three-box it may be, but the gently smoothed surfacing and proportions are less jarring than the Merc, which looks like it’s been developed by lying at the bottom of a fast flowing river. The Mercedes has mass where the BMW has geometric muscle. Yes, that flared nostril of a front grille with its moveable plastic flaps on the BMW is a bit in yer face, but it suits the car better than the wraparound ooze that is the EQE’s nose. Both have overly complex wheels – the BMW in the pictures featuring 21-inch ‘Individual’ spec aero alloys, the EQE similarly sized rims made up of roughly 400 hard to clean spokes – but moving around the car, the wide rear lights of the i5 make
it look lower and wider, where the EQE looks a bit pinched at the back.
It’s the same story on the inside. The BMW has a seamless curved set of interface screens, the Mercedes a decent driver’s display and a somewhat stuck-on portrait screen in the middle. You look out over the BMW’s bonnet, albeit stationed behind a steering wheel that’s much too thick, where the Merc’s nose drops away. In the BMW you feel – and are – lower, more pilot than operator, in the Mercedes there’s a feeling you’re
