The wagon is finished. That much has been settled by the market, by the product planners, and by the relentless rise of the high-riding crossover that replaced it in virtually every segment. MINI killed the Clubman, one of the last genuinely small performance wagons sold in America, and most of the industry followed suit or never bothered in the first place.

And yet I just spent a week in a 717-horsepower BMW M5 Touring. I daily a MINI JCW Clubman. And I’m having trouble making the narrative fit the reality.

Something curious has happened in the last few years. BMW didn’t just reintroduce the M5 Touring after a 15-year absence, it introduced the M3 Touring as well, a car that has never come to the US but has far outsold BMW’s expectations in every market where it is sold. Audi continued developing the RS6. Mercedes kept the E63 Estate alive. These are not niche experiments. The wagon may be dead in theory. The high-performance wagon appears to be thriving.

The Internet Has Already Decided

Before I get to what the M5 Touring actually is, it’s worth dealing with what the internet has already decided it is. The verdict was issued quickly and confidently, mostly by people who have never sat in one.

The criticisms are not invented. The G90 M5 tips the scales at approximately 5,390 pounds, nearly 1,000 pounds heavier than the F90 it replaces. That’s 540 kilograms more than the outgoing M5 Competition and over 600 kilograms more than the M5 CS. To put that in a context no one finds comfortable: the original E28 M5, introduced in 1985, weighed 3,153 pounds. The F10 and F90 generations both came in around 4,100 pounds. The G90 represents a generational break in the weight trajectory, not a continuation of it.

The G90’s power-to-weight ratio of 299 horsepower per tonne is actually lower than the F90’s figure of well over 300 horsepower per tonne. The headline acceleration figures reflect this. The Touring hits 62 mph in 3.5 seconds, a tenth slower than the F90 Competition’s 3.3 second time. For a car with 100 more horsepower than its predecessor, that gap tells you everything about where the weight penalty shows up.

The platform tells part of the story. The G90 M5 shares its architecture with the i5, a decision that enabled efficiency and production economies but brought with it the dimensional consequences of an EV-capable platform. At 200.6 inches long and 77.6 inches wide not counting the mirrors, the M5 Touring is almost the same size as the three-row BMW X7. Dimensionally, it rivals some older 7 Series models. That is not a number that arrived by accident.

The criticisms, in other words, are grounded in data. The question is whether the data tells the whole story.

What a Week Actually Reveals

As review after review rolled out on the new M5, there were no shortage of headlines alluding to the car’s weight, or comparing the new car to the best of the last generation, the M5 CS. Funny how that works. Because 99.9% of the people with opinions on this car have never driven it, let alone sat in it. After a week of throwing everything at it, and in it, that I could think of, I have a decidedly different verdict.

The weight is real. Under heavy braking the mass shows up, and when pushed hard through tight bends the G90 exhibits some body roll, reminding you of its size. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But BMW’s M engineers have spent considerable effort making that weight feel smaller than it is in the situations where you actually encounter a car: the motorway, the urban commute, the road trip. At those speeds and in those conditions, the suspension in Comfort mode makes the M5 a smooth, luxurious cruiser, gliding over road imperfections with ease.

The hybrid system, so often cited as the problem, is in daily driving something closer to an asset. The electric-only range is limited, around 24 miles on a good day, but in stop-and-go urban use the car pulls away in near silence with immediate torque, and the transition to the V8 is managed well enough that you stop thinking about it. This is not the hybrid system as compromise. It is the hybrid system as a daily-driving tool that occasionally lets 717 horsepower off the leash.

I took it to Road America for IndyCar. 3.5 hours each way. Real load in the boot. Real motorway miles. The wide-opening tailgate and lower load height compared to an X5 make it genuinely easy to use, whether you’re loading suitcases or stowing track-day gear. The M5 Touring does not pretend to have cargo space. It has 58 cubic feet of it with the seats folded, against the sedan’s 18.7. That is a transformative difference in the kind of car it is.

The electric range earned its keep in less glamorous circumstances too. At 5am, with the family and their luggage loaded for an airport run of just over 20 miles, the M5 Touring covered the entire journey in complete silence. No V8, no fuel, no drama. It is the kind of thing that sounds like a footnote until you experience it, and then it reframes what the hybrid system actually is: not a performance additive, but a genuinely different way of using the car depending on what the moment asks for.

The Clubman in the Garage

Here’s where it gets personal. My daily is a MINI JCW Clubman, one of the last sold in the US before MINI discontinued the wagon entirely. The F54 JCW isn’t a lightweight in MINI terms, weighing in at 3,594 pounds. However, despite this, it’s still the quickest MINI ever tested. Packing 306 hp and 331 ft lbs of torque, it hits 60 mph in only 4.4 seconds. It also fits in any car park, any garage, any gap in urban traffic. And perhaps most importantly, it’s nimble in a way that has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with feel.

Parking these two next to each other produces a moment of genuine absurdity. The M5 Touring outweighs the Clubman by nearly 1,800 pounds. It is nearly four and a half feet longer. The Clubman JCW was arguably the smallest performance wagon BMW Group produced before ending production. The M5 Touring is the largest 5 Series ever and is, dimensionally, in the territory of older 7 Series saloons.

And yet they share a lineage of intent. Both make the argument that practicality and driver engagement don’t have to be a trade. Both prioritise the roof-rail form over the raised ride height. Both exist because someone at BMW Group believed the wagon was worth defending, even when the market kept suggesting otherwise.

The difference is in what each car asks of you. The Clubman asks for engagement. It rewards attention. It communicates through the steering and the chassis in a way that makes the driver feel involved in something, a quality that only deepens with the right modifications. The M5 Touring mostly just handles things. It is so competent, so thoroughly managed by its systems, that the experience shifts from involvement to oversight. Almost as if you are supervising a process run by a machine far smarter than you could ever be.

That is not a criticism, exactly. It is a description of what the car is for and who it is for. But it is worth naming.

Wagon vs SUV

The other comparison worth making is the one nobody says out loud but everyone is thinking: why not an X5 M? Or an X6 M? Both are faster off the line in some configurations, both offer comparable practicality, both sit within range of the M5 Touring’s price point.

The answer is height. Ride height changes how a car moves, how it loads in corners, how connected the steering feels to the road beneath it. The M5 Touring, despite its dimensions and mass, sits lower than any of those alternatives. It combines the practicality of an SUV with the performance of an M car, but does so from a stance that the SUV simply cannot replicate. If you have driven both back to back, you understand the distinction immediately. If you haven’t, the M5 Touring is the quicker way to find out what you’ve been missing.

It’s also infinitely cooler than an SUV.

The Verdict, Such As It Is

Would I swap the Clubman for an M5 Touring as urban transportation? The honest answer is: the Clubman fits my life in a dense city better. It fits the garage. It fits the parking spots. It fits the preference for a car that asks something of you rather than simply delivering. Living in an environment where every block is a negotiation between size and speed, the Clubman remains the more logical choice.

But the M5 Touring keeps presenting a counter-argument. If money were no object, and the garage lengthened, it would be impossible to walk away from. It is the rare car that makes a persuasive case for itself in circumstances that should work against it. Yes it’s 5,500-pound hybrid wagon. But such is the ownership experience that it bends the normal operating rules of decision making.

The high-performance wagon was supposed to be a dying breed. The sales figures, and a week behind the wheel of the most extreme example of the form, suggest the obituary was premature.