Kith Bmw V10: Ronnie Fieg’s fourth chapter with BMW pairs a hand-built manual-swapped classic with a glimpse of the brand’s electric future.
Ronnie Fieg doesn’t do quiet collaborations. At Monterey Car Week, his fourth and most ambitious partnership with BMW materialized as two vehicles that exist at opposite ends of the automotive spectrum: a painstakingly restomodded E53 X5 with a V10 engine bolted to a six-speed manual transmission, and a singular 2027 X5 concept that signals where the Munich brand is headed. The first is pure mechanical theater, raw and analog. The second is tomorrow, rendered in prototype form.
The restomod X5 reads like Fieg’s manifesto in sheet metal. The original body wears a fresh rebuild, but the mechanical heart is all rebellion: that V10 pulled from a high-output BMW engine bay and married to a stick shift, a combination most modern SUVs wouldn’t dare attempt. It’s a thing built for someone who understands that the best cars tell a story through their steering input and engine feedback, not through screens and convenience features. The detail work is surgical. This isn’t a hasty swap job. This is a statement that the SUV, that bloated symbol of modern compromise, can still be bent toward purity.
Placing these two vehicles side by side at Monterey wasn’t accidental curation. It’s a conversation about what endures and what evolves, filtered through Fieg’s lens as someone who respects both the mechanical past and the technological present. The Kith BMW V10 partnership has matured from novelty into something genuinely conceptual, treating the automobile as a canvas for exploring contradictions that define driving right now.
