Revisionist History - An Ode to the BMW M5: From Car Show! with Eddie Alterman

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Malcolm confesses to being an absolute car nut. And now his dream has come true — the launch of a car show at Pushkin. Car Show! is hosted by Eddie Alterman, the longtime editor of Car and Driver. On Car Show!, Eddie tells the stories behind the most important cars of our lifetimes, cars that transcend their “carness” with a significance beyond horsepower or miles per gallon. We hear about cars that changed how we drive and live: the Jeep Wrangler, the Chrysler minivan, and even the Lunar Rover. In this preview, you’ll hear Eddie going for a ride with Malcolm in his most prized possession: a 2003 BMW M5. Don’t miss this and other Malcolm cameos and ridealongs in upcoming episodes of Car Show! this season. Listen at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/carshow?sid=revisionistSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello, revisionist history listeners. As some of you know, I'm a car nut of longstanding. And my friend and fellow car nut, Eddie Alterman, the longtime editor of Car and Driver, is about to launch a new podcast with Pushkin Industries, Car Show, telling stories not just about horsepower and handling, but about how different cars have changed the way we live our lives. It's so good. After much begging and pleading, Eddie agreed to let me go on his show. And this, the episode I'm about to share with you, is the result. We took a ride together in my most prized possession, my silver 2003 BMW M5, around the winding, empty back roads of upstate New York.

This is the car for people who think that computer chips, the internet, everything digital, and Elon Musk ruined the automobile. From the outside, totally harmless. But oh man, Eddie will explain to you why when you see one of these on the road, you should bow down and kiss the pavement. By the end, I got worried that Eddie wasn't going to give it back. He was just going to steal the keys, drive it all the way home to Detroit, and leave me with his Hyundai. Surely you remember Kanye from Gold Digger. You'll see him on TV any given Sunday, win the Super Bowl and drive off in a Hyundai. That was almost me. Okay, enough. Here's the episode. And for goodness sake,

subscribe to Car Show with Eddie Alterman, because it's all gold. I'm super nervous driving your car. Oh no, don't be. It's like, you know, it's funny. In my old Golf R, I felt invulnerable. And in, same thing in the Cadillac

CTS-V, I feel like, I really feel like they're going to cover up any errors you make. This car, there's a little hint of danger. I feel like... You're a little bit on your own. You know, they send you off and they say, you know, be well, my son.

Isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that keep you... It does keep you at your toes. Yeah, there are no safety nets, and that's, I think, probably good for the human species in general. A little automotive Darwinism always focuses the mind. I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is Car Show, my podcast about why we drive what we drive. I'm with my friend and fellow

car geek Malcolm Gladwell. We're on the pockmarked, slushy switchback roads of upstate New York. I first met Malcolm back in 2013 when he chided me about something I'd written in Car and Driver. We've been friends ever since and today we are on a vision quest. We are looking for the soul of the sports sedan. We are also looking for lunch. And we're doing it at the wheel of Gladwell's own 2003 BMW M5. This is a car that is wholly accepted by me and most other car geeks as the best sports sedan of all time. Not just of its generation, not just the best sports sedan that BMW ever made, no, the best fast-forward door that ever was.

And it's no wonder BMW made it. BMW built its reputation on sports sedans and coupes, not sports cars. Going back to the 60s, BMW made upright little bricks harboring dark souls. Fast, terrible goblins from the Black Forest of Germany, with names like 2002 and 325iX. They would sneak up behind your Mustang on a moonlit two-lane road and terrorize you for however long it took them to pass. There are many jokes about the people who own them. What's the difference between a porcupine and a BMW? Porcupines have their pricks on the outside. BMW sports sedans were always better than their sports cars. They didn't make flying pizza slices like Ferrari or

Pantera did. They made cars that flew under the radar, which is why many people, cops included, might look at this high-performance version of the respectable 5 Series and see just another country club car. But to those in the know, this stealth factor is a huge part of the appeal. It's what makes the M5 so exotic. And it is why we are somewhat comfortable doing extra-legal speeds on the back roads of the cop-infested Hudson Valley. This is no flying pizza slice. On its surface, it's just a middle-of-the-pack BMW.

But underneath, that's where the magic happens. This version of the BMW M5 is the most responsive sports sedan ever built. The most poised. The most sensitive. Oh, wait, we've got to put it in sport. Yeah, it's got the... Sport is real in this car. Yeah, definitely. The throttle response is dramatically quicker. Yeah. I'm offended they have a sport setting. It should just be tuned to sport. Right.

Who would drive this car and not want it in sport mode it's kind of like 11 on nigel toughenal's amp yeah exactly you need that little extra push over the edge you push the sport button but it's just like alive in your hands in a way that modern cars aren't and yet it still feels totally modern That's why I think this is such a high watermark for cars in general. This version of the M5 hit the market 23 years ago. A few sports sedans came before it, and many came after it, but it is widely accepted in the car community as the GOAT. The peak. Never bettered. I know you're thinking, no way this can be true. Those of us who've canonized it must just be nostalgic for the time it represented.

A time of Tamagotchis and Beanie Babies. Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys. Who wouldn't pine for those days? But just as Backstreet Boys become Backstreet Middle-Aged Men, no car can remain at the peak for 20 years. If you look at the numbers, acceleration, braking, road holding, cars don't peak really. They keep getting faster, grippier, quieter, more comfortable, more reliable, better, better, better. They are quite literally vehicles of progress.

Today's cars are digitally remastered to perfection with all kinds of automated wizardry, all kinds of management software, and with all the flaws removed. Whereas pre-millennial cars are mostly just straightforward mechanical parts, straight up analog. By the sheer empirical evidence, like acceleration and fuel economy, the notion that the newer digital car is better than the old analog one is manifestly true. And yet, here we are behind the wheel of a 2003 BMW M5. And here I am with the claim that it's still, almost 20 years later, the best sports sedan of all time. How can this be? How can a car that came out two decades ago still be the top of the mountain? On this episode of Car Show, we're going to try to answer that burning question. We'll pit old versus new, the 2003 E39 M5 versus a 2022 M5 competition.

We're going to see if my assertion holds up, or if I'm just nostalgic for that time I tried out to be a backup dancer for the Backstreet Boys. Thanks. Oh, it's so good. It's so, so good. That engine note alone, I could fall asleep to this engine note. It's so smooth and beautiful. We are attacking the mountain roads of the Hudson Valley in Malcolm Gladwell's cold silver 2003 BMW M5. The sky is spitting out a faint sleet.

These roads are narrow and frost-heaved, with the added threat of wandering livestock. This is the perfect crucible for this car. A test of body composure, engine response, and ride quality. We'll soon repeat the same exercise on the West Coast, in more perfect road and weather conditions, with an allegedly more perfect 2022 BMW M5 competition. But this won't be a traditional car magazine comparison test, out on the test track in controlled conditions. It can't be. For one thing, BMW wouldn't give us the new car in New York to go toe-to-toe with Malcoms. Something about summer tires and too much snow and my

driving record. But even if we can't drive them A to B on the track, or even over the same roads in the same conditions, I'm convinced we'll get a strong impression of which one is the better sports sedan. Which one fulfills its mission better? Which one is more fun to drive? And most important, why? It must be said, the notion that a big German sedan should be fun to drive might seem ludicrous. This looks like a banker's car. The whole point of these things is to create an air of respectability and gravitas, not

tire smoke. A mid-sized German sedan like this one would seem to lack a certain joie de vivre. But while it might look like a regular old BMW 5 Series, look closer at the 2003 M5. It sits lower. The M5's fenders have a more pronounced flare. The wheels are wider. It's way more badass than other, lesser BMW 5 Series cars. The M5 is the work of BMW's internal motorsport division, the Clauses and Helgas who make BMW's racing cars. The M5 is the work of BMW's internal motorsport division,

the Clauses and Helgas who make BMW's racing cars. Hence the M. This generation of BMW 5 Series had the internal codename E39. So pretentious BMW geeks love to call this car the E39 M5.

Y'all hear that? We use the cod M5. Anyway, the E39 M5 came out in the late 90s amid fears that the world would collapse on January 1, Y2K. But the good thing about this M5 is that it would have kept running even if all the computers in the world took a dirt nap. Like all cars of the era, it was gloriously mechanical. It wasn't dependent on satellite uplinks to find its way via Google Maps. There were no over-the-air updates to keep its software fresh. There was no electronic suspension, just mechanical dampers. No electric power steering, just a hydraulic pump. Even the engine's variable valve timing was controlled via oil pressure. It was entirely kinetic, with just a few safety nets like traction and stability control to keep the thing from falling off the road.

It's just all about tuning and refinement and, you know, getting that sort of lapidary smoothness across the whole car. And, you know, this car is like great hi-fi, where at low speed you get terrific definition, but when you crank it up, there is absolutely no distortion. You know, it's just high fidelity. That's a very nice... What I love is just how it's so liquid. It just flows. The interior is perfect.

This is totally driver oriented. It's elegant, it's simple. The gauges are where they need to be. There's nothing to fuss around with. And to me, it's like, you know, if I was designing the ultimate luxury car right now, I would have none of that shit in it. I would just have a steering wheel and maybe a radio.

Yeah. One moment that made the E39 M5 such a car culture hero was when a guy named Alex Roy decided to take the car and drive across the country as fast as he could. He used the E39 M5's incongruity to his advantage. Big, comfortable, fast, and long-legged. A double-take car. Not the kind of machine that looked like it would be doing 130 miles per hour across Oklahoma. Roy wanted to be the latest person to beat the cannonball Run coast-to-coast driving record, famously set in 1971 by Car and Driver editor Brock Yates and American racing legend Dan Gurney. The Cannonball Run was a real cross-country event dreamed up by Yates.

It started at the Red Bull Garage in New York City and ended at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California. It even spawned a couple of very campy cannonball-run movies. This is the story of an average guy and a beautiful girl. Burt Reynolds, Jackie Chan, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise. It was the car guy's godfathers 1 and 2. They all set out one day in an ambulance from New York to California at 150 miles per hour. California, here we come! So in 2006, Alex Roy bundled up all these threads and recreated his own cannonball drive, from the original start to the original finish. His car? A blue E39 M5. It was

done up to look like a German police car, complete with all sorts of cop-evading technology. I'm not sure if this made him blend in or stand out. Either way, he made it look like insane fun. He broke the record, going coast to coast in just 31 hours and 4 minutes. Alex will talk about his car in that drive all day if you let him, but I like this version. For Alex, there was no better car for the transcontinental run than the BMW M5. With a 5-liter 400-horsepower V8, it was fast. It's Ice-T describing the car in a film called Apex,

the secret race across America. With the suspension tuned for Germany's Autobahn, the M5 would hold up under hours of triple digit speeds. This was a car you could drive through the night and feel energized when you got out. Perfect for flying fast and low across the continental U.S. Malcolm and I, however, were not out to set any records. We were just looking for a good club sandwich. Also, the ride on this car is insane. It's just so, it's, how it could be so composed and yet so athletic is like... It's an amazing trick. It's a muscle car, but it's absolutely a car you could drive to the opera. It's just tuning and tuning.

There was a guy who worked at BMW. His name was Rich Brekus. And he was a really great car guy. And he was very, very good at explaining automotive engineering to English majors like me. And we were at dinner one night, and I asked him, why are BMWs so good? And this was when... When they were. When they were.

And when BMWs were just a cut above of everything else, they responded like no other car. They just felt better. They were more communicative. They had better feel. They responded like no other car. They just felt better. They were more communicative. They had better feel. They were more alive. And he drew a little graph, like an asymptotic line. And he said, okay, here down low on this asymptote is where Audi stops tuning. Up here on the asymptote is where Mercedes stops tuning. All the way out here to the right is where we stop tuning. And what he meant by that was, this is about human feel and what the driver is experiencing. Yeah. And keeping after it, keeping after those little nuances and subtleties of driver feel and response. That's what sports sedans should be about.

They should be about that sensitivity to driver inputs. And this thing, I mean, you turn the wheel, you get a perfectly predictable response. Yeah. No, the steering is divine. They actually went a technology back in the steering. They went from rack and pinion to recirculating ball. When everybody had gone to rack and pinion because it was a little bit cheaper and easier to package, they went back to recirculating ball steering because they had better feel. Oh, I didn't realize that. It has a little retro flavor. Yeah. Those little nuances, and it's just so smooth.

This is a car you can steer with the throttle pedal. So when you're cruising around a racetrack, and you're sort of at the limit of the tire's adhesion, if you give it a little bit of gas, the car pushes a little. You take your foot off the gas, it tucks in a little bit for a turn. And, you know, you're not just driving it with the steering wheel. You're driving it with the brakes, the throttle, and the car is just moving and fluid and alive. That is so, so rare for a sedan.

So the E39 M5 was pitch perfect, meticulously tuned for the serious driver, the person who appreciated how finely wrought it was. It was the Hattori Hanzo sword of cars. Nowadays, though, the consensus among serious drivers is that BMW as a whole isn't quite what it was. That this one-time maker of the best sports sedans in the world, the ultimate driving machines, if you will, is at parity or worse with other car makers. Which is why our producer Sam Dingman asked me and Malcolm... What would you guys say changed at BMW that makes them not as good anymore? They wanted to sell cars to mainstream Americans, basically.

Right? Yeah. That's the short answer for sure. Beyond that, there is time. Like Rich Brekus said at that dinner, time is the secret ingredient. Time creates the handshake of trust you get with a great car like the E39 M5.

With all the cars BMW makes now, how can they possibly spend the time necessary to hone their edges? And now they have, you know, iXs and i4s and 4 Series and 6 Series and, you know, all of these cars. It's just a lot to manage and a lot of cars to tune. And back when the E39 M5 was around, BMW didn't make very many cars. They didn't have this huge lineup of SUVs, sedans, and sports cars. You know, they weren't working on electric vehicles and high-performance sedans and all that stuff. There's just so much time to go around, and the E39 M5 was lavished with time.

After the break, we're going to drive the new BMW M5 and see how it measures up. This is just nuts. It's nuts. I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is Car Show. Los Angeles, California. Not too far from where the cannonball run ended and Alex Roy cracked that first cold one. Good morning.

What's up, buddy? Wow, look at this. Sam and I are at the wheel of a metallic green 2022 M5 in competition trim. Check it out. Okay, let me just get my recorder out. Okay. The real color is called Verde Hermes.

It has 617 horsepower to Malcolm's car's 394. It costs $138,000 to Malcolm's 70,000. Though Malcolm's car is 3,000 miles away and tucked back into winter storage, the impression it left on me is vivid enough. Has all this evolution led to a more engaging car, a better sports sedan, a more fun ride? All right, so here we are in the, this is the 2022 M5. There are tons of key differences, all of which I describe as

the difference between a digital car and an analog car. But this car does not have a manual transmission. It has an automatic transmission that's highly adaptive to your driving style. And this car claims to get to know you. It shifts intelligently. It knows if you're driving hard, and it will hold gears for you. It will downshift for you if you bend it into a corner really hard, or set up for a corner, I should say. So, you know, all throughout this car, you're going to see the transition from an analog, very simple sort of car to a much more complicated, much more software-intensive machine. The roads we're driving are not like the ones in upstate New York. The roads around here are impossibly smooth, perfectly undulating.

Vines crawling up the lush Palos Verdes hills. They are the platonic ideal of driving roads, the video game version of reality. Same with the car. There's a nagging video game-like simulation to the whole thing. Here's a list of what was mechanical in Malcolm's car and is now electronically controlled. The shifter, the steering, the braking, the suspension, the rear differential. And there's stuff in the new M5

that never even existed when Malcolm's car was around. Stuff like electronically controlled all-wheel drive, lane-keeping software that scans the road and sends a little buzz to the steering wheel when you veer out of your lane, automatic emergency braking in case you don't react quickly enough to the person slamming on their brakes in front of you,

blind spot warning, which flashes a little light in the side view mirror, Wi-Fi, Apple CarPlay, in-car apps like Waze and Pandora, accessed via Apple CarPlay. And as we'll see later in the episode, something called gesture control. The thing about great sports cars, and I think this is also true of great sports sedans, is that there's a level of simplicity there. All of the efforts are transparent.

All of the functioning is transparent to the driver. But, you know, the thing about Malcolm's car, the E39, is that that is a triumph of tuning, of honing and honing and honing. It's very simple analog stuff. No adaptive suspension. No software in the suspension. No software in the transmission. No software in the suspension, no software in the transmission, no software in the rear differential. It was just tuned by humans, and you can really tell.

You can really, I mean, you feel the artist's hand. Okay, I have to digress here for a second. There's something I just can't get out of my head when I'm driving this new 2022 M5. There's a record producer named Rick Beato with a popular YouTube channel. In one video, he plays a clip of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham bashing away.

An isolated track of him just jamming, au naturel. Let's hear what the unquantized version sounds like. You can hear those. Then Beato plays a version of the same bottom beat that's been processed through the computer and quantized. Quantizing is when you use digital technology to perfect the timing and intervals between notes. Let's hear the quantized one again, just for comparison. So stiff. It just sounds dead. It sounds robotic, sounds programmed. Bonham is widely regarded by drummers as the E39M5 of rock skinsmen, the GOAT. His sound is crisp and ringy, and he always seems to play right in the pocket. But Beato's exercise reveals that Bonham's tempo is all over the place. He's not perfect, far from it. His drumming is sort of

in conversation with Jimmy Page's guitar and John Paul Jones' bass, reacting to them. Moving the beat around so it swings, so it grooves, so it feels alive. The imperfections are what make the song work, what propels it forward. The perfected beat Beato made? It feels lifeless. So it is with the 2022 BMW M5. Perfect. Airbrushed.

Flawless. Also, to look at it, it's more overtly sporty and aggressive. The sneak attack is gone. Nothing under the radar about this thing. Our car was just dragging green with yellow gold brake calipers, huge bronze wheels, gigantic flared nostrils. You notice it. I mean, this is an

incredible car, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have the same level of feel and the same level of engagement at every speed that the old M5 has. I mean, listen to this. This is just nuts. It's nuts. And it really

livens up and it feels tremendously sporty and fun. But the whole process is being managed by electronics. Right. Like triggering a line of code. Right. Triggering a line of code. It's not the real thing. Yeah. It's a

simulation of the real thing. Yeah. It's a simulation of the real thing. Yeah. In this new M5, you can tailor the simulation. Through the central screen and console-mounted rotary dial, you can choose the engine response mode you want, from laid-back to face-melting. You can adjust the dampers from motel mattress soft to diamond-tipped hard. You can firm up the steering, hasten the shift speed, a portion torque around the car, all via the screen. In the E39, there's none of that. There's no customization beyond the sport mode, which, as we've established, is superfluous. There are no settings to configure, no menus to scroll through.

It's the antithesis of the new M5. And this one, it's saying, look, we've created all these customizations you can choose. Just push a button and we'll adapt to what you want. Whereas the old one, it was like they were saying, this is what you want. Yeah, and we know what's best. We're the chassis engineers. We know what's good. And this is our philosophy and we believe it. And so should you. I mean, there's an irony in that choice, right? You think, oh, well, you know, if I can

choose my chassis settings and my steering settings and how I want to put it all together. I have more choice. You know, I'm in more control. But, you know, the simple single setting approach of the old car, ironically, gives you a greater feeling of control, not less. This car, obviously, you know, the ride is really supple. You know, it's a great car. There's no question about it. But is it more fun to drive? It's certainly faster. Right. Does it communicate with you more?

I would say no. I think there's a layer of mediation between this car and its driver. It's Bonham optimized. It's Bonham without the swing, the give, the tension. All this electronic virtual stuff, all these non-mechanical interfaces, they're a layer of mediation between the human and the machine. A thin film of artifice.

We might not be able to put words to it, but we can feel it somewhere deep down in the uncanny valley. We're talking about the old school versus the new, and, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm a stick in the mud or that, you know, I don't have an appreciation for what the new sort of rules are and how incredible the performance of some of these machines can be. But there's a difference between the kind of on-paper gains, like in grip and in shift speed, in horsepower and torque. There's a real gap between that on paper stuff and how the car makes you feel.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like subtraction by addition almost. Yeah. I am really not trying to dunk on the new M5. It's not some outlier, a purely digital, cold robotic machine in a sea of warm automotive dolphins. All cars are like this now. It takes us back to the original question.

Why is that old M5 so memorable? Why do we love it so? Because it's analog and the new car is digital. Because they had time then they don't have now. Truly, they don't make them like they used to. Does it result in a car that makes you happier? I would say no. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Deep down, it's about agency. Deep down, our kind of limbic system, our lizard brain knows that we're not in control. We don't love that. Yeah. Yeah. Hey guys.

How's it going? Hey guys. How's it going? Through the miracle of Bluetooth hands-free calling, we thought we'd check back in with Malcolm. So are you in the M5 right now? Yeah, we're at the wheel of the M5. He wanted to know what it was like. We wanted to let him know to keep his old car. 617 mostly unusable horsepower.

We're talking about this idea, we're circling this idea of like index of usability, right? Yeah. How much of the car can you use safely on public roads within your level of ability and skill so that's fun and not completely dangerous and terrifying? And that's where this car really falls down to me. It's so incredibly competent and powerful and does so many great things and but where are you going to use it it's nowhere yeah no it's like a total waste of time i don't even understand like so you're gonna you're really gonna putter around town in the in the walmart parking lot in a car with 700 horsepower. Right. Right.

It's like the whole thing's ridiculous. We've gone past the reasonable peak of these kinds of automobiles. There's all this incredible amount of brain power that's being used to serve a very questionable and marginal end. I want to liberate the engineers of BMW and put them on a project that's worthy of their intelligence and expertise. I once attended a lecture by a guy, a really brilliant engineer out of Stanford, who figured out how to make a compostable toilet. Yeah. All you needed was sand, gravel, dirt, and a lot of worms.

And this is a guy who could have, in a previous iteration, could have gone to work for you know BMW or General Electric or instead he decided is there a way to get worms to be the active component in one of the world's most pressing problems and the answer is yes yes the people didn't understand that you had to aerate so you just have a hole and you poop in the hole and the worms break it down so quickly it doesn't even smell this is a smart dude who instead of working on the final tweet to the internal combustion engine or adding 20 horsepower to a 650 horsepower car, decided he would fix toilets. And do something that's useful to the health of humanity.

Exactly. That's a worthy problem for the person who extracted an extra 100 horsepower out of the BMW. Maybe one day Malcolm's vision will come true, and we'll get the world's best engineers to focus on solving problems that actually make the world a better place. Until then... The last thing I want to show you is,

we were talking about audio and digital stuff. Here's the convergence of it. I can control the radio. I can control the radio volume with my finger. I'm not even touching the knob. You're waving your finger in a circle. I'm waving and swiping at the screen like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

I'm just making a circular motion with my finger. That's gestural control. That's the abstraction there. Okay. I'm terrified. Right? Car Show is written and hosted by me, Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Sam Dingman, Jacob Smith, and Amy Gaines. Our editor is Jen Guerra.

Original music and mastering by Ben Taladay. Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney and airbrushed by Greg Lefevre. Our patron saints are Litao Malad and Justine Lang. Big thank you to my guest and BMW M5 enthusiast, Malcolm Gladwell. And thanks to the folks at BMW for the ride in the 2022 M5 competition. Car Show is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries,

consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for $4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. To find more Pushkin Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

That was just one of my cameos on Car Show with Eddie Alterman. On their upcoming season, you'll hear stories about the car that defied gravity, how the minivan changed modern America, and much more. Find Car Show with Eddie Alterman wherever you get your podcasts.