BMW 550e xDrive M Sport Pro - long-term review

This month I’ve been sampling the 550e’s manual. Not the transmission – this is a firmly auto-only machine – but the actual paper-and-ink booklet. Yes, I resorted to reading the instructions, and yes, I am faintly ashamed of this fact.

I’d been attempting to get to the bottom of the 550e’s many driving modes, which include PERSONAL, SPORT, SILENT, EFFICIENT, RELAX and EXPRESSIVE. What else was on that shortlist? MELANCHOLY? PENSIVE? BITTERSWEET?

What do all these modes… do? Unclear. SPORT is sporty, but as for the rest… yeah, beyond altering the cabin mood lighting and display screens, something of a mystery. You might assume SILENT to be a full EV mode. It is not.

The only one of these modes you can truly configure – so far I can tell, at least – is Sport, where you can pick-and-mix your preferred drivetrain, steering, damping and traction control settings (so long as you’re signed into the My BMW app: if not, even that’s off limits).

In other modes, the sum total of the configurability appears to be ‘do you want the roof blind open or not’. PERSONAL is, for reasons unclear, almost entirely un-personalisable. I found myself, in short, somewhat baffled. (Or, at the 550e would doubtless render it, BAFFLED.)

Was the manual enlightening? It was not, merely informing me that PERSONAL offers ‘comfort oriented settings’ while EFFICIENT offers ‘a consumption-optimised setting’. Care to chuck in any specifics there, lads?

What I’d been seeking was a way to control the 550e’s hybrid set-up: specifically how to order it to run in electric-only mode, maintain its battery charge, or use the ICE to recharge the battery. I had naively assumed one of the many MODES might hold the key to this. It would seem they do not.

Because, after setting fire to the manual and embarking instead on a great deal of Googling, the conclusion I’ve come to is: there’s no quick way to control the 550e’s hybrid settings.

As far as I can ascertain, the only way to order the 550e into all-electric mode is to dive into the sub-menu of a sub-menu of a sub-menu (Vehicle > Driving settings > Drivetrain and chassis > Electric driving > ELECTRIC automatically, since you ask). Same for getting it to hold battery charge (Vehicle > Driving settings > Drivetrain and chassis > Maintain battery charge). I haven’t yet discovered a way to force the ICE to recharge the battery.

Yes, you could set a shortcut to get to these screens quicker, but it’s still far from convenient. BMW, it seems, wants you to leave it to the machine. The manual confidently asserts the 550e will automatically apply the most efficient hybrid settings based upon the route you’ve stuck into the sat nav, but what about when you’re not using the nav? And even if you are using the nav, how can it know whether you’re planning to recharge at the end of your route?

Previous BMW plug-in hybrids had physical buttons for hybrid, electric and battery hold. Bring back the buttons!