At sixteen, freedom came wrapped in a small rectangular bit of plastic. Alex Yust got a fresh driver’s license from the Hollywood DMV. It wasn’t just about transportation, it was about going places on his own terms. Still, cycling was his first real escape. He could ride to the beach, to Hollywood, anywhere his legs would take him. It was his first connection to the road, and that feeling never left.
The M5 isn’t so different. It’s pure, mechanical, and direct. Feet move rods that open butterflies and push incompressible hydraulic fluid. Hands steer and levers move gear selectors. Like a bike, there are consequences when you push and pull on things. Unlike new cars, with the m5, there’s no interference in-between doing, and happening. If his bike is Alex’s simplest way to connect with the road, the M5 is the best way to amplify it.
Then there’s the question: why does this car exist? Why did BMW take a race-bred engine and stuff it into a 5 Series? When it launched, it was the fastest sedan in the world, a car for those who wanted a family-hauler that could also outrun most sports cars. It was hand-built, absurdly over-engineered, and, in the U.S., available in exactly one color combination: black over beige.
Why? Maybe it’s that what the Germans thought we deserved, or maybe it was just German pragmatism. While European buyers got a wider range of options, BMW locked American customers into a single spec. No other colors. No manual seat adjustments. Just a black suit over a beige interior, no frills, no distractions. Before the M5, sedans were practical. After the M5, they had to be something more. The super-saloon market was born, and every automaker spent the next decade trying to keep up.
Alex’s car isn’t stock anymore. It’s been tweaked, refined, made better. It sits lower, grips harder. It’s carried 212,000 miles of history, across the country, through years of memories, through the hands of his cousin before him. And it’s still here, still moving. Plenty of people have tried to buy it, but he’s not selling. Some things, once they become a part of you, aren’t meant to be let go.
