Ferdinand Piëch's secret W10 BMW M5 goes under the hammer in Knokke
The only road car with a Volkswagen W10 wears a BMW badge
In 1999 Ferdinand Piëch, then running the Volkswagen Group, ordered a ten-cylinder engine for a high-performance saloon that neither Volkswagen nor Audi yet built. His engineers tested it in the car they wanted to beat: a BMW M5. That car, a 2000 E39 in Carbon Black, crosses the block at Broad Arrow's Zoute Concours auction in Knokke-Heist on 9 October, estimated at €250,000 to €350,000.
Volkswagen's W10 gives the E39 M5 480 hp and 592 Nm
The W10 is a naturally aspirated, all-aluminium engine of about 5.0 litres, rated by Broad Arrow at 480 hp and 592 Nm. That is 80 hp and 92 Nm more than the 4.9-litre S62 V8 BMW fitted at the factory. The six-speed manual stayed, but ABS, traction control and stability control are all switched off, and the engine runs on its own standalone ECU. The intake, ignition and coolant expansion tank were made for this car alone.
Sabine Willeke's team built three W10 engines, and one went into a car
Sabine Willeke, who led the engineering team, told the auction house that only three W10 engines were ever built. One powers this M5, a second will stand beside it at the sale, and the third is in Germany. The programme ran outside Volkswagen's official research department on Piëch's direct instruction, and the current owner puts its cost at close to €2 million. The top estimate is less than a fifth of that.
Piëch drove the M5 himself on temporary plates
Piëch drove the car himself during its secret development, on temporary plates. The longer-running story that he commuted in it every day is not in Broad Arrow's account, and nobody can check either version: a Stack racing dash replaces the BMW cluster, so the car has no odometer. From outside it looks standard, and the factory car phone still sits in the armrest. The current owner bought it about a decade ago, registered it in Slovakia and still drives it.
The W10 sits between Volkswagen's W8 Passat and the Bugatti Veyron's W16
The W10 is the one member of Piëch's narrow-angle W engine family that never reached a buyer. The W8 went into the Passat in 2001 with 275 hp, the W12 into the Audi A8 and Volkswagen Phaeton, and the W16 into the Veyron in 2005 with 1,001 hp, the last engine in a line that Bugatti still credits to Piëch. When the group finally built a ten-cylinder saloon, it chose a V10: the 2006 Audi S6, with 435 hp from 5.2 litres.
No certificate of conformity follows the W10 M5 to its next owner
The M5 has no certificate of conformity, so a buyer who wants to register it outside Slovakia faces an individual approval for an engine no authority has seen. BMW's own ten-cylinder M5, the 2005 E60 with 507 hp, needs no such paperwork. The sale runs during the Zoute Grand Prix week in Knokke, a crowd that already knows the secret BMW prototypes Alpina built for Munich were worth keeping.
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Piëch's M5 matters more as evidence than as a car, and that is its strength. The W8 and W12 survive in thousands of Passats and Phaetons and the W16 in every Veyron, but only this E39 shows the step between them, running, registered and still driven. Broad Arrow's top estimate is under a fifth of what the programme cost, which is a modest price for the missing chapter of an engine family that ended in Molsheim.
The missing certificate of conformity will keep buyers who want an M5 to drive cautious, so the bidding will come from collectors of Volkswagen Group history. Knokke in October is full of them, and on 9 October they should carry the car past its €250,000 low estimate. A result below it would mean collectors still pay for Piëch's finished products rather than his workings.
