• Excellent build quality
• Screen-heavy control system
• But iDrive dial compensates

How is the quality and layout?

Very good. The most impressive thing about the BMW i5’s interior is its build quality. It looks and feels like a miniature i7. That’s high praise indeed, especially when you consider that the cheapest i5 costs more than £25,000 less than the entry-level i7.

Naturally, with a price gulf that vast, BMW has had to cut some corners. So, the i5’s door switches and door panels aren’t quite as luxurious as the i7’s and its seats aren’t quite as plush. The two cars share their steering wheels and infotainment systems, though.

In any case, the i5 is a lot better finished than its closest rival, the Mercedes EQE. We’ve spent some time testing the two cars side-by-side – and the EQE feels like an unfinished product compared to the i5. Its materials are far cheaper, the air vents on the extremities of its dashboard shake like they’re held on with Blue TacK and the buttons on the centre console wobble on their mounts.

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The difference is especially noticeable at the top end of both cars’ line-ups. The i5 M60 is far better assembled than the AMG EQE 53 – and, somehow, BMW has managed to make it around £15,000 cheaper. That’s a no-brainer in our book.

If we had to issue criticism, it’s that there are slightly too few physical controls. Even the air vents are opened and closed with touch-sensitive sliders, which feels like tech for the sake of tech to us. Still, the i5 is far easier to live with than either an EQE or a Tesla Model S.

Infotainment and technology

The dashboard is dominated by two displays – a 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster and a 14.9-inch infotainment system – that sit under one piece of curved glass. The driver display is a little busy, but it’s very configurable, allowing you to choose from a full-screen map, a read-out of your safety data or just a twin-dial setup.

BMW shoved most of the i5’s interior functions onto the touchscreen, which we’d normally have a good moan about. But this system has been designed quite intelligently. For starters, all the icons are large which makes it easy to hit the right button when you’re bouncing down a bumpy B-road. It’s a simple bit of common sense thinking that all other manufacturers should adopt if they’re going to insist on moving all their cabin functions onto their touchscreens.

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Plus, the i5 features BMW’s excellent iDrive rotary controller on the centre console, which allows you to navigate to any bit of the screen without poking it once. Lots of functions, such as selecting a radio station or setting navigation instructions, can be performed using voice commands – and BMW’s system even did a reasonable job of understanding our most slack-jawed northerner. All this means you don’t need to divert your attention too far from the road to operate the screen.

Comfort

The i5’s seats are excellent. They’re a quite a lot firmer than the seats you get in the i7 or indeed the EQE, but that just means they support you better on a long journey. As a result, you don’t end up prying yourself out of the car at the end of your journey like you’re made of dry-rotted wood.

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The M60’s seats have a fantastic function. They’re fitted with adjustable panels that tighten up around your legs and sides when you switch the car to sport mode – and it makes a huge difference to how upright you can keep yourself when cornering hard. They’re very supportive. Refinement is good overall, too. Because the suspension is so firm and the alloys are so big, some road noise can push up into the cabin, especially when crash over a pothole. But wind noise is well suppressed and the road noise fades away well once you’re cruising along the motorway.