BMW X5
The New X5 Kept the Right Bones
BMW's bestseller reuses the outgoing benchmark's chassis and spends all its daring elsewhere — a polarizing face, a three-ton battery, and a purge of beloved X5 signatures.
BMW spent a decade convincing itself the fourth-generation X5 was, in its own product planners' words, the benchmark of the large luxury SUV. So when the fifth generation broke cover in Spartanburg wearing Neue Klasse's new face, the interesting question was never what changed. It was what BMW had the nerve to leave alone — and whether the things it did change were the right ones to bet the bestseller on.
The bones it kept
Of this week's reviewers, only Chasing Cars says the quiet part into the microphone: the new X5 does not ride on the clean-sheet Neue Klasse platform at all, but on the previous car's bones, re-engineered for 800 volts and a battery the size of a chest freezer. That reads like an indictment until the reason lands. BMW's own planners, Tom Baker notes, considered the outgoing car "still pretty much perfect" and the benchmark of the segment. A benchmark is not something a company throws away to make a point.
Essence over skin
Keep what defines the car, risk what doesn't — that instinct gets its clearest reading over at The Fast Lane Car, where the veteran critic Motoman sorts the X5 into two piles. The powertrains, the reworked B58 straight-six BMW bothered to re-engineer rather than retire, are the things it couldn't change and still call the result an X5. "The stuff that's polarizing," he says, "is what it looks like." The bones were never the gamble. The face is.
Dazzled by the face
Not everyone clocks the carryover. Edmunds opens by calling the car "an all-new leap forward" and relays BMW's boast of a two-generation jump, before quietly reserving judgment until someone actually drives it. CarExpert goes further still, describing the X5 as riding BMW's brand-new Neue Klasse architecture — the precise claim Chasing Cars spends its whole walkaround dismantling. The disagreement is the tell. A face new enough will convince even a professional that the entire car underneath it must be new too.
Where the risk lives
If the platform is the safe bet, the change list is the exposed one. The fifth-generation X5 sheds the split tailgate that survived since 1999, drops the seven-seat option its rivals still offer, retires the rotary iDrive controller, and buries the climate vents inside a touchscreen — losses four of the reviewers flag independently, often mid-praise. Then there is the mass. The electric iX5 weighs almost 2.9 tons, and Carwow's Mat Watson, no skeptic of the styling, still nods at the freshly revealed Audi Q7 and allows it "may well have BMW licked." None of that is a platform problem. All of it is a decision problem.
It does not sit on the Neue Klasse platform. It sits on an enhanced version of the cluster architecture from the old car.
All the power trains, that's the stuff they couldn't change. That makes it a BMW.
They genuinely call it a two-generation leap, not just one. Whether or not that's true, we won't know until we get behind the wheel.
This is on its brand new platform called the Neuer Classer. And that means this has basically the cutting edge of technology.
It's actually based on the old X5 platform, but they made it slightly longer so they can fit a big battery in it.
The reviewers, side by side
5 reviewers. 3 questions. Where the arguments overlap and where they diverge.
The gamble was never the platform
Strip the reveal-day noise and the panel's own contradiction settles it: the critics who called the platform brand-new — CarExpert loudest among them — were simply wrong, and it hardly matters. Reusing a chassis BMW itself calls the segment benchmark is the most defensible thing the X5 does all day. The real exposure is everything chosen freely: the split tailgate, the seven-seat option and the physical controls now gone, and Chasing Cars' unanswered question of whether three tons can still corner the way an X5 is supposed to.
The bones were the easy call — the X5's fate rides on everything BMW felt brave enough to change.