The 2018 BMW M550i xDrive: Can It Daily?
But not all is well in paradise
While the interior looks and feels amazing, in typical BMW fashion, it is also filled with some of the most asinine and absurd tech features and control layouts.
Let’s begin with the gesture controls. Why in the hell do I need to wave my hand in a circle to adjust volume? Especially when that gesture has to be performed within inches of the actual dash-mounted volume knob. Yes, it does keep our greasy fingers off that piano black trim, but the function was so inconsistent in functioning that we usually gave up on it. The two-finger “poke” to skip forward songs on the other hand, works great. So well in fact that when trying to point out a store front to a passenger, it skipped over the song we were enjoying.
The cabin of the M550i is more than spacious enough for four adults, and the trunk is big enough to swallow all the luggage you would need for those four people.
Then there is iDrive. Since its introduction, iDrive has been a very divisive piece of technology. We tend to fall into the middle range of the love and hate scales. Some functions on the newest system are smart and intuitive to use and it makes controlling various features of the car wonderful. Others functions, like the fact we have to navigate through four sets of menus to rest our average fuel consumption, make us curse the name of every engineer that even looked at the underlying code.
Back to the real world
Speaking of fuel economy, the BMW M550i xDrive features both a wallet-destroying thirst and a surprisingly frugal demeanor depending on how heavy your foot is. The car is rated for 16 mpg in the city and 25 on the highway with a combined rating of 19. Our overall average fell in the range of 20, but that is with close to 75-percent highway driving. When we reset the trip meter and went for a morning of more spirited adventuring, we managed to clock in around 13 mpg over 70 miles.
To be fair to BMW’s engineers, we also went out to see just how high we could move that fuel-economy gauge in the dash. Using some hypermiling skills we’ve picked over the years, we did manage to push the M550i all the way up to 35 mpg in the Eco Pro mode. It certainly wasn’t fun or fast, but if you really need to eke out a few more miles from the tank, you can do it.
Overall the 2018 BMW M550i xDrive is a pretty great car. It has a ridiculous name, and at times the disparity between its sports car parts and luxury sedan demeanor can jar the experience, but overall it’s hard not to love. The sleek new design is as sexy as we’ve seen from BMW in decades. The Mediterranean Blue paint drips with class and style, and the performance is near the top of the segment.
The BMW M550i may not be the perfect package, but it is the total package.
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