BMW built the new 5 Series for the person in the back, not the one at the wheel. Six hundred kilometres down the coast showed me exactly what that means.

There is a particular kind of pleasure in leaving Mumbai before the city has properly woken up, pointing a big, quiet car south, and knowing you have the better part of a day and six hundred-odd kilometres of the coast ahead of you.

I have done the Mumbai-to-Goa run several times, and I have learned that the trip tells you more about a car than any test track ever will.

So when the new BMW 5 Series arrived, in long-wheelbase form and in a rather lovely shade of blue, the plan wrote itself. Drive it to Goa and back, and find out what it is actually like to live with.

The 5 Series has always been an interesting car, and this generation is a genuinely bold reinvention of it.

For decades this was the driver’s sedan, the one you bought because no other car in the class cared as much about the person behind the wheel.

This one deliberately turns that idea around. In India it is sold only in long-wheelbase trim, a format once reserved for China, and BMW has made no secret of who it is chasing: the chauffeur-driven buyer who spends the journey in the back seat rather than at the wheel.

The aim is squarely to beat the Mercedes-Benz E-Class at its own game. That is a big shift for a badge that built its reputation on the opposite instinct, and it colours everything about how the car drives, looks and feels.

The size is the first thing you register. The wheelbase alone is 3,105mm, 130mm longer than the last-generation car and the longest in the segment, longer even than the new E-Class it squares up against, and at 5,175mm long, 1,900mm wide and 1,520mm tall, this is the largest sedan in its class in every dimension.

You feel every bit of that on the move, and again the first time you thread it through a tight Goan village lane.

The design is part of that same rethink. BMW has been making some genuinely bold styling calls of late, and yet the 5 Series is one of the more restrained results, still relatively traditional in its silhouette and overall stance.

There are clear efforts to broaden its appeal, though. The nose is larger and more expressive than before, with a kidney grille that glows at night, and I still like it, even with the added drama.

The rear is where it loses me. The tail treatment does not have the timeless quality that previous 5 Series cars carried so easily, and a few years from now I suspect it is the back of this car that will date first.

It is handsome enough in blue, especially in the soft light we caught heading down, but it no longer has that effortless, ages-well elegance the old cars wore so well.

None of that matters much once you are moving, because on a road trip you spend your time looking at the inside of the car, not the outside.

And the inside is special. There is a real sense of occasion to this cabin, in the materials, the construction, the way it is all screwed together, and much of it has more in common with the 7 Series than with anything lower in the range.

The curved display, one part 14.9-inch touchscreen and one part 12.3-inch digital driver’s display, is crisp and the infotainment is one of the more intuitive systems in the class.

Some of the trims genuinely lift the mood of the place, the crystal-effect iDrive controller and the backlit Interaction Bar that glows across the dash chief among them.

The whole cabin is 100 percent vegan, the panoramic roof floods it with light, and this being the largest car in its segment, back-seat space is predictably vast. The rear bench is beautifully padded and set at a relaxed 31-degree recline.

It is not perfect back there though, and on a car at this price the gaps are worth naming.

There are no rear window blinds, which feels like a genuine oversight in our climate and on our highways.

You cannot recline the backrest, which both the E-Class and the old 6 GT allow; there is no boss mode to slide the front passenger seat forward from the back, and there is no rear-seat entertainment package.

You do get neck pillows, four-zone climate control, a wireless charger, a head-up display and a very good 655-watt Bowers & Wilkins system up front, but for a car pitched so squarely at the person in the back, a few of the things that would make that seat an event rather than merely a very comfortable place to sit are simply absent.

It is a lovely back seat. It just stops a little short of making an occasion of it.

The bigger story, and the one that defines this car, is the way it rides.

This 5 Series sits on noticeably softer suspension than any 5 I can remember, on steel springs rather than the height-adjustable air setup you can get in an E-Class or 6 GT, and the effect on a long drive is wonderful.

It handled the broken stuff on the way out of the city with real compliance, and on the bouncy, patchy stretches of the Goa highway, where lesser cars fidget and thump, it simply breathed with the road and stayed composed.

Our car wore the optional 19-inch M alloys in 245/55 rubber, and I was glad of them, because they put back a little firmness and body control.

The standard 18-inch wheels, wrapped in narrow 225-section but chunky 55-profile tyres with their taller sidewalls, would ride even more sweetly, but they leave the car looking slightly under-tyred, almost like an entry trim, and after a week with the 19s I would probably live with the very slight loss of plushness for the better stance.

There is a catch that comes with all that softness and all that length.

Over the worst sections of road, and over the bigger speedbreakers, I had to be genuinely careful not to scrape the underside.

The car is long, it sits fairly low, and the pliant suspension lets it settle onto its springs in a way that catches you out if you arrive at an obstacle too fast.

On a route where the road surface can change from smooth tarmac to lunar in the space of a corner, it meant I was reading the road well ahead and crawling over the rough stuff, which is not something the old, tauter 5s ever asked of me.

When the road opens up, though, this is a lovely thing to cover distance in.

Under the bonnet is BMW’s familiar 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol making 258hp and 400Nm, helped by a 48-volt mild-hybrid system worth up to 11hp and 25Nm under hard acceleration.

There is no EV-only mode, but you never crave it, because the engine is beautifully refined and still has real performance in reserve when you ask for it.

BMW claims 0 to 100kmph in 6.5 seconds, genuinely brisk for a car this size, and the 8-speed torque-converter automatic is superb.

The sheer quiet of the cabin at a cruise is something I came to treasure over three long days.

The steering carries a decent, reassuring weight, the brakes are easy to modulate, and the whole experience is serene in a way that suits the mission perfectly.

There is still a flicker of the old engagement on the twisty bits, particularly through slow and medium-speed corners where the car turns in tidily and holds its line, but nobody should mistake this for the 5 Series of old.

It is rear-wheel drive with the ideal 50:50 weight split, yet the sharpness that defined every previous generation has been softened in pursuit of comfort, and without the adaptive damping the old car had, it simply feels soft where it used to feel sharp.

On safety, there are seven airbags and Level 1 ADAS with automatic emergency braking and lane-keep assist, though the lack of adaptive cruise is an omission I felt on a long highway haul.

While I miss the old sharpness in the abstract, on this particular trip I never once wished it back.

Because that is the thing this drive taught me.

Judged as the driver’s car the badge used to promise, the new 5 Series comes up a little short.

Judged as a way to travel, which is what it was built to be and what a road trip actually demands, it is quietly brilliant.

It flattens distance, it isolates you from the worst of the road and the noise, and it deposits you at the other end unruffled and unhurried.

There is a strong case that the very best way to enjoy this car is not from the driver’s seat at all, but stretched out in the back with a driver up front, watching the coast slide by.

And on a relaxed, chauffeur-driven run down to Goa, with the miles ticking away in air-conditioned quiet and the light going gold over the Konkan, I found it very hard indeed to hold that against it.

At Rs 75.80 lakh ex-showroom, some seven lakh more than the car it replaces, it is a lot of money, but it is also a lot more car.

BMW set out to build the most comfortable car in its class rather than the sharpest, and by the time I turned back for Mumbai, I had stopped mourning the old 5 and started to understand the new one.

Which seat you are in still decides the story. But if the plan is a long, unhurried drive to somewhere worth arriving at, this is one of the finest ways I can think of to get there.