Comparison Tests
From the February 2007 Issue of Car and Driver
These are the sedans that stir men's souls. Yeah, yeah, that's not quite what Thomas Paine said in 1776. But if he'd been with us while we were putting this threesome through its paces, he might have been tempted to devote his literary talents to something other than revolutionary pamphleteering. Might even have signed up for a blitz course in German, to put a finer point on the subtleties of these four-door bullets.
The German language would certainly be appropriate because, when it comes to sedans capable of simultaneously indulging a driver's hedonism and transporting the spirit, nobody does it better than the denizens of Deutschland. Is it the influence of the autobahn, which continues to be the world's most demanding high-speed-driving development crucible? Or the handling demands of the Nürburgring's Nordschleife, the fabled circuit used by German carmakers to test their cars, a track that magnifies any dynamic shortcoming a car may have.
In a word, ja.
The names here will be familiar to faithful readers — Audi, Mercedes, and most particularly, the BMW M5. Since the arrival of the first M5 20 years ago, this Bimmer has been the benchmark in luxury sports sedans and as such has been the centerpiece in four previous comparison tests, where it has prevailed three times, including a first place in another three-way duel just over a year ago "Bahn Burners, Episode 39," [C/D, January 2006]. That M5 was fresh off the boat, giving us a first opportunity to record formal test data with BMW's new V-10. Another M5 carried your humble narrator to an easy luxury-sedan class victory in the 2006 running of One Lap of America, and even though we carped about the irritating quirks of the sequential manual gearbox, it was hard to imagine some other contender upending the champ, particularly this early in its latest renewal.
But the status doesn't remain quo in this high-powered game for long, and soon we found ourselves planning yet another bullet-sedan, uh, shootout. BMW had yielded to the persistent U.S. market clamor for a manual-transmission option for the M5, Audi had added V-10 power to the A6, yielding a new S6, and AMG had massaged the new Mercedes E-class, creating an E63 AMG.
With November grays and snow squalls descending on Ann Arbor, we arranged to rendezvous with our three superkrauts in L.A. From there we rumbled up to Willow Springs, in the high desert near Edwards Air Force Base, for instrumented testing, then spent the next two days on gorgeous back roads to and from Monterey, a trek that included the 137-mile run down California Highway 1, a collection of curves, cliffs, and Pacific views that has few equals anywhere.
When the brake pads cooled and the ballots were tallied, there were surprises, and a verdict that was not quite unanimous. But if we differed on who's No. 1, we were united on this: In the world of bullet sedans, it's still Deutschland über alles. In this rarified price-and-performance category, any member of this Teutonic trio is superior to anything offered by anyone anywhere else.
