Outback luxury

The only glitch is with the satellite navigation. It has thrown in the towel, given up because it does not understand the route, Brisbane to Perth through the middle of the country? Give us a break.

Perth's CBD is back the other way, along the big highways to the south. This business of trying to run east-west with a lack of bitumen and serious highways does not compute. The Outback Highway, through Winton, west to Alice, southwest to Laverton and on to Perth, has a decent amount of dirt and gravel and no place on BMW's list of places to navigate.

It is a hard road in places and offers adventure in others. This 5000km run across the continent is the ideal way to see how a fancy-dancy, luxo-Euro, soft-road machine can cope, without a white-gloved, lab-coated BMW technician within cooee.

We push on. Dodge late evening kangaroos, early morning carcasses. Shift over for the road trains, round up the trundling caravans. In the pre-dawn light on a straight piece of bitumen, a roo shooter heading home in the loaded LandCruiser ute flicks up one little gibber, just the one, which explodes on the screen and leaves a bullet-sized hole on the outside. Bugger.

Later, that same day, a slow-rising pigeon collides with the German wagon's grille, leaving small creeks of blood and a handful of feathers. None of this fusses this diesel BMW X5. Down the track it runs hard and strong, proud nose (now with nostrils tinged with dark red) pointed west and sun filling the mirrors, a little hint of turbocharger whistle as the engine swings into stride.

Up the bitumen the trip computer is showing 2100rpm in sixth for 110km/h and 9.2 litres per 100km. More kilometres and a steadying cruise control and the consumption drops again. At 130km/h it is running at 10 litres per 100km, take it up to 200km/h on an unrestricted Northern Territory road and there is a little more diesel running down the lines.

This is a sweet, sweet engine. Over a long, long trip it becomes a genuine mate.

It is not just the consumption, and the range (maybe 900km plus on an easy run). It is also the power and the torque and the seamless delivery of both through a six-speed automatic transmission. Out here there are few needs for hurried changes. I slip to sport and manual mode and flick down to third or fourth for a sprint past a road train; I indulge in a little ratio-flicking when running down sandy bush tracks and I remember to turn off the parking distance control, which registers each and every blade of spinifex.

For the rest of the ride, tar and dirt, the full automatic mode is just as easy, especially now this 3.0-litre engine produces 150kW and a tonne of torque, 480Nm from 2000rpm.

Two blokes, two swags, two bags of clothes and cameras, computer, camping gear and spare wheel. It all fits with ease, even while rear vision is restricted to the side mirrors.

Most of the BMW's cabin is familiar territory. This is the revised edition, four years after the X5 arrived to critical and consumer acclaim. There have been some minor cosmetic changes outside but the big news has been the new xDrive system, which BMW says splits the torque and drive to the four wheels ¿almost clairvoyantly¿ as it predicts vehicle behaviour and acts early to enhance traction.

This reworked diesel engine is quiet and efficient from town to country.

"Flash car that one, hey," says the man with the big hat, black face and full, grey beard in Docker River.

Packing the wagon highlights a couple of niggles. The six-disc CD stacker is tucked away in the side of the boot and this means unpacking and repacking luggage to change the music on a long haul; six discs do not go far when radio reception is gone and there's ground to cover. On the plus side, the player never skipped a beat, even over some of the best of the country's corrugations.

And where's the 12-volt socket up front? There is a handy pair in the luggage compartment, a plugged-up cigarette lighter up front.

The trip computer is a boon, calculating fuel consumption and range and average speeds. The fuel gauge is almost redundant.

At the end of nine days and some 5000km later, the computer reckons the X5 has averaged 91.7km/h and 9.8 litres per 100km. That is a good deal for the work that's been done, from running hard in a two-tonne machine down red desert highways to sticky-beaking around Alice Springs.

"It's done well for a little car," says the woman jumping into the loaded LandCruiser wagon at Tjukayirla Roadhouse, some 1400km northeast of Perth on the Great Central Road, once part of the famed Gunbarrel Highway. It is tamer these days but there remain enough patches of rock, sharp-edged cattle grids and rough and rumbling corrugations. The BMW sailed through, dusty and muddy and proud.

Seats up front were good for a 1000km day, the stereo kept on and most minor controls became intuitive after a day in the cabin.

Some scuff plates on the bottom inside of the front doors would be appreciated, as dusty boots invariably leave marks as driver or passenger swings out.

And maybe there were a couple of times where a little more suspension travel would have been appreciated, once or twice bigger jumps and bumps set the BMW yumping although it never bottomed out. And that xDrive comes into its own once the traffic is left behind and the wattle is flashing past.

With a central, electronically controlled, clutch and Dynamic Stability Control combining to deliver power to wheels with best traction, xDrive is less dramatic than earlier systems; it keeps the wagon sure-footed with seamless predictions and reactions to iron out understeer and oversteer.

Where the diesel X5's steering feels a tad heavy dodging through Alice Springs roundabouts, it is a different yarn out on the road.

The BMW sits flat and unflustered on bitumen racing through the grass plains of western Queensland. The speed takes away that heaviness. And then there are the unsealed sections, 1700km of the 2700km Outback Highway. So from Boulia to the Alice, from Uluru and west across the border, skirting the Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts, the BMW proves its ability to soak up the worst of Australian roads, dancing down the dirt in a German four-step.

The wagon's road manners were forever impeccable in an environment too few BMWs will ever see.