2012 BMW M5 unveiled at Nürburgring 24

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Filed under: Sedan, Performance, BMW, Misc. Auto Shows, Luxury

We Attend The Official F10 BMW M5 Coming-Out Party, Hobnob With Its Project Manager

2012 BMW M5 - Click above for high-res image gallery

We have seen it hinted and teased and glossily presented all over the internet, so we flew ourselves to the Nürburgring 24-hour affair and got all over her. Of course, we're talking about the long-awaited F10, or fifth-generation, M5 from BMW. The big news is that it will likely be priced at just eight percent above the starting sticker of the last-generation V10-powered E60 M5. Make that a cool $92,000. Then add M bells and whistles.

We know most of the details in the general sense. (The assembled BMW development bosses were all bragging about how much they had driven it already around the Nürburgring and Hockenheimring, and all those other 'Rings we don't get daily access to. Dirty dogs.) A 553-horsepower, 4.4-liter Twin-Power Turbo V8 shared with the X5 M and X6 M behemoths, plus the small matter of 500 pound-feet of torque between 1,500 and 5,750 rpm. Redline is now right around 7,200 rpm instead of the discontinued E60 M5's V10 that smacked us around at 8,250.

Versus the predecessor, which ceased production way back in December 2009, power is up by roughly 10 percent, torque by 30 percent, and fuel efficiency also by a whalloping 30 percent. "Drive it on the autobahn at full unrestricted speed around 180 miles per hour," says the F10 M5's project leader, Albert Biermann, "and certainly those efficiency numbers suffer. But our engineers drove the F10 every day to and from home some weeks, and have realized all of these better numbers."

Read the full details about the F10 M5 after the jump.Continue reading 2012 BMW M5 unveiled at Nürburgring 24

2012 BMW M5 unveiled at Nürburgring 24 originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.



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