VW’s Secret W10 Engine Makes The Best M5 Even Better

Early 2000s Volkswagen was an engineering powerhouse. Under the leadership and direction of Ferdinand Piech, the company was constantly pushing the limits of what we thought was possible from a production car. This is the era that produced the now famous W engines, with the Passat (and others) W8, Bentley W12, and the Bugatti W16.

One such design the company built but never entered production was a W10. The automaker was going after BMW and wanted to create an M5-crushing model with that engine. To test it, the company put it into a BMW M5, years before BMW ever thought of putting a 10-cylinder of its own into the car.

While we’ve gotten glimpses and insights into the engine and that prototype before, we’ve never seen it in this level of detail. Drivetribe has tracked down that W10 5 Series and dived in head-first, driving the car and tackling a W10 on a stand to show what it was all about. You can watch that video at the end of this article.

Piech Made Volkswagen Awesome – And Expensive

Under Piech, Volkswagen spent billions on engineering strange solutions and stranger vehicles. This is how we ended up with a W8-powered Passat wagon with AWD and a six-speed stick, how the 1,000-horsepower W16 Bugatti Veyron was born, and how VW was cramming V10 and V12 diesel engines into SUVs.

Piech wanted to go after the BMW M5. It’s not clear if he wanted to do that with a VW or an Audi, but knowing Piech the answer was “both.” Because the company didn’t have the right chassis for it, it built this BMW M5 as a testbed.

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According to the video, Piech actually drove this W10-powered BMW as his own ride, testing out the 480-horsepower engine to find out if it was viable. Or at least, that’s the excuse he gave. This engineer-turned-boss was one of the grandsons of Ferdinand Porsche. The Porsche. His other accomplishments included giving Audi five-cylinder engines and starting the project that created the Quattro rally beast, so he was a keen driver who surely appreciated the dynamism of arguably the best M5 ever made.

The W10 Prototype Lives And Breathes Fire

Drivetribe found the car in Belgium (though it has Slovakian plates), with an owner who is clearly incredibly into the W engine. They have this car as well as one of the two other W10 blocks thought to exist. They also have a collection of other W-engines and W-engined models.

It might seem like the perfect place for this unicorn to live, but the video says that this car is for sale. Of course, it’s teasing us by not saying where we might be able to find it. That’s okay because we found it anyway. There’s no price listed, but there are some more photos.

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Projects like this aren’t uncommon. Some other examples include the Holden-badged monstrosity that was created to develop the C8 Corvette, a stretched Ferrari 348 that hid the Enzo’s 6.5-liter V12 in the back, and another (E34) BMW M5 that was used to test the V12 bound for the McLaren F1. But what is rare is that we actually get to see them. Even rarer is when one escapes into the wild, like this one, making it the ultimate cool unicorn ride.

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