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

True, it’s tough to imagine the circumstances in which you’ve purchased a super-saloon with a glorious, 300bhp-plus straight six, yet chosen to only employ its electric motor. Critical local fuel shortages? Petrol cap jammed shut? Someone’s nicked all your sparkplugs and you’ve got to get home somehow? (Yes I know the 550e wouldn’t actually let you drive at all if its sparkplugs had been half-inched, let’s just go with this one.)

Ever keen to provide answers to questions no one asked, I’ve been running the 550e on electrons alone, and can officially report that, yes, it works just fine as a pure electric car.

The e-motor generates nearly 200 horsepower and over 200lb ft of torque in its own right, so there’s sufficient shove to get the 550e up to motorway speeds and keep it there. Performance certainly isn’t hot-hatch rapid – thank the 5’s 2,200kg kerbweight for that – but for pretty much all your day-to-day stuff in the UK, it’ll do the job just fine.

I’m not sure I’d want to venture onto the derestricted autobahn on battery power alone, but I suspect I’ll never be asked to, so at ease.

Power delivery in e-mode feels surprisingly… petrolly. The e-motor sits upstream of the gearbox (and centre differential, obvs), so you get momentary pauses in power while the transmission shifts cogs. It’s quite strange. It’s quite nice.

I’ve not yet got close to the 550e’s quoted 57-mile electric range. Currently I’m returning somewhere in the mid-30s – but then ‘currently’ is the depths of British winter, requiring wipers and heaters and Harmon Kardon stereo on full blast to drown out the incessant noise of the rain. When the weather warms up, and it stops raining – please, lord, let it stop raining soon – I’d be hopeful of getting closer to 50 miles out of an (electric) tank, at least for non-motorway driving.

So, in conclusion, yes. You can, should the mood so take you, run your 550e as a full EV, at least for the hour or so until it runs out of charge.

But the question is, when you’ve got that magnificent B58 at your disposal, why would you want to? Buying a 550e to use as an electric car is like… using a grand piano as a pretty shelf for your houseplants: possible, yes, but rather a waste of its talents (and your cash).

One small wrinkle to report: the 550e has auto-dimming wing mirrors. This is not the wrinkle. The wrinkle is: on a long drive recently, the off-side mirror (and only the off-side mirror) decided, for no apparent reason, to permanently engage Maximum Dim mode. This might have been lightly annoying in the daytime. However, it was night, meaning a 200-mile motorway schlep with pretty much no idea what was happening on my right-hand side.

Cleaning the relevant sensor (found at the base of the rear-view mirror) failed to fix the issue, but here’s the real frustration: there’s no way to turn off the auto-dim function, at least not without tearing out a fuse somewhere.

That’s the biggest headache with this 550e: its desire to keep you at arms-length from its decision-making processes, whether that’s dimming mirrors, its hybrid settings or just trying to turn off the auto wipers. (Please, 550e, the nice man is trying to wash my screen. Let him do his job without attacking him.)

Such driver-infantilising isn’t unique to BMW, but paying 90 grand to be treated like a child does feel faintly galling. Give me the option to switch things off! Especially if those things aren’t going to actually work!