2010 BMW 550i Gran Turismo - Car and Driver (blog)
This may be hard to accept, but what you see here is a BMW that’s not really conceived to please Bimmer loyalists in the U. S. That’s because this inflated version of the 5-series sedan is aimed at expanding markets where vehicle priorities... Not that this swollen five-door is deficient in basic BMW dynamic virtues. 9 inches longer than the 2011 5-series sedan on which it’s based, 1. 6 inches wider, 3. 8 inches taller—make the regular 5s look svelte. Our test car weighed almost 2. 5 tons (4939 pounds), which is a staggering 891 pounds more than the last 550i we tested [November 2006]. Nevertheless, the 550i GT prances right along with its tidier stablemates, sprinting to 60 mph in 5. 2 seconds... That’s a wink quicker than the sedan in that 2006 test. The GT’s 400-hp, 4. 4-liter direct-injection twin-turbo V-8 churns up 40 more horses than the naturally aspirated 4. 8-liter in the 2006 test, but the real key to the GT’s performance is the turbo V-8’s massive torque—450 pound-feet, a gain of... BMW’s chassis engineers have already shown us remarkable skill in mass management with the M versions of the even heavier X6 and X5, and the GT is another example, albeit not as extreme. Source: www.caranddriver.com
