You can call it an estate car if you like, but people in the know prefer to think of it as a BMW 5 Series Touring, with the emphasis on the "Touring". Who can blame them? We all know, deep down, that the word "estate", when appended to the name of a car, tends to come across like a sigh of resignation, interchangeable with other words such as "compromise" and "sensible".
"Touring", on the other hand, appears to have something of the alpine air in its hair. It smacks of freedom, the open road, baggage-free adventure in unchartered regions, and all those other things one has generally drawn a thick line under by the time one buys an estate car. In a BMW 5 Series, we are not merely going to the dump to dispose of our sacks of garden waste - we are touring.
OK, so it's not a perfect verbal fit. But we need a term to set this sophisticated and life-enhancing slab of German engineering apart from all those other cars with big boots. "Touring" will have to do.
It's not often an estate car shows any interest in gladdening the heart. Most of them are too busy fulfilling their roles as glorified wheelbarrows to have time for flirtation and witty repartee. As long as they have seats and a steering wheel, stop and start when told to, and come with a tailgate that doesn't take your head off on the way up, nobody much complains.
The 5 Series, however, even while boasting a load-space of 500 litres and enough airbags to quiet the most eagerly cosseting parent, generously and heroically retains at least a vestigial interest in stirring your soul, or regions thereabouts. This is partly a matter of the car's undeniably dinky body panels - a sexy arrangement of convex and concave surfaces in the new, rather superior BMW style. (It seems to be the mission of all new generation BMWs to resemble, in so far as is possible within EU regulations, the Batmobile.)
Couple this with the way the tailgate folds around into the sides of the car and it is fairly clear that we are not merely looking at a saloon on to the back of which someone has hammered a tea chest. Still more engaging is the confidence-inducing way in which the car handles - by no means a given in a vehicle roughly the shape and length of a hearse. I drove an automatic 530d - the turbo-charged, three-litre diesel version - which was so frugal it almost seemed embarrassed about asking me for fuel, yet which, at the same time, gave that sense one gets from a good BMW saloon that one is driving a spongier, more buttock-pampering sports car.
The refinements in this case are BMW's Dynamic Drive system, some electronic stabilising gear (first used on the 7 Series), and active steering that alters the amount of tug needed to work the steering wheel in relation to the speed at which the car is travelling. The combined effect of these gizmos makes it possible to motor unflinchingly through sharp corners without necessarily having to see, in your wing-mirror, the unnerving sight of your own rear end pulling out to overtake you.
The car is now in its third generation, and, in keeping with broader developments in the evolution of motoring, the new model is taller, wider and longer than the outgoing one, and therefore potentially just that little bit more difficult to park. That said, mine came with BMW's parking distance control system.
The system is both audio and visual, with a colour diagram appearing on the central screen on the dashboard, showing the car surrounded by a range of zones, darkening from green to red as those menacing stationary objects grow nearer. Meanwhile a bleeper gibbers away with increasing nervousness. (Contrast the soothing, almost therapeutic harp sound the car makes when you attempt to leave it without switching its headlights off.)
What with the general sense of electronically generated panic, it is a bit like being beckoned into a space by Corporal Jones from Dad's Army. My feeling, having tested the system extensively in a city environment, is that if you trusted completely in the PDC's paranoid verdict on what constitutes too close for comfort, you would never find a space big enough to park in and would be forced to drive around in circles until you ran out of petrol.
Fortunately, there is an off-button on the dashboard for anyone willing to fly solo and help revive the ancient and increasingly neglected art of reverse-parking in urban conditions.
The interior of the BMW 5 Series Touring, as is traditional with the company, takes the form of a small symposium on leather and ergonomics. Even the boot has been expensively upholstered.
It was with some guilt that I put a dog in it. And it was with some reluctance that the dog eventually returned to live in the house. But that is the Touring lifestyle. It gets a hold on you and won't let go.
The lowdown
BMW 530d Touring
Price: £33,930
Top speed: 151mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 7.4 seconds
Consumption: 39.2mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Boswell
On the stereo: BBC Radio 6
En route for: The Western Isles
