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So you want a sport-utility vehicle with sports car performance and handling? You know, like 0-60 in six seconds? Road-hugging all-wheel drive, communicating through huge, low-profile 20-inch tires? Top speed of 150 mph?

Do I have an SUV for you. SAV, rather.

Impossible?

Nothing’s impossible in this great country, if you have the price. And this dreadnought will set you back the price of a modest house, or a very nice double-wide, complete with satellite dish, tiedown straps and skirts.

That’s probably how some of those who fashion this piece live, for it’s assembled in Spartanburg, S.C., though engine and transmission and sundry bits – 55 percent in all – come from Germany.

Apparently BMW thought there was still some untapped market – although they’ve cranked out more than 100,000 X5s in the two years they’ve been building them – so this year they’ve released a no-holds-barred edition bound to stir envy among the early acquirers down at the country club. (To emphasize its non-utilitarian nature, they dub it a Sport Activity Vehicle.)

No doubt, too, there’s a bit of healthy cross-country rivalry being played out here, too. Mercedes-Benz lets its supertuner affiliate, AMG, take care of the grubby details to produce a similar SUV-styled exoticar, which in fact has been enhanced for the 2002 year. You can get into an X5 for a mere $39,545, if you’re ascetic enough to avoid the options list and can live with piddly 3-liter engine and a manual transmission.

If you want the real BMW experience, however, in a machine pushing 2 1/2 tons, you’d better opt for the 4.4i series, a long stack of greenbacks up the hill, with a base price of $50,045 – crack the piggy bank, though, because there are some can’t-resist options that’ll make it more like $55K, driveaway.

What are you going to do if somebody at the club or office already has one, or an M-B/AMG M Series? That horrible conundrum has been solved this year with introduction of the X5 4.6is. Figure on about $70K, same exclusive neighborhood as the hotrod Benz. As the name suggests, the 4.6is offers a slightly larger (bored-and-stroked) version of the V-8 that powers the mid-series machine.

The minuscule increase in displacement, however, thanks to some underhood jiggery-pokery, has resulted in an inordinately greater power output. (Not enough, perhaps, to justify the price increment, but the 4.6is also comes standard with almost every option that can be grafted onto its less-endowed sibs.)

The 4.6is engine – a 32-valve, variable camshaft V-8 Ð puts out 340 hp at 5,700 rpm, not at all coincidentally a near-match for Mercedes’ sport-tuned 5.5-liter V-8, used in the ML55. The 4.4 got a little bump this year, but is still rated at just 290 hp.

Mercedes, however, thanks to the greater displacement, can claim the edge where it counts – in torque. The 5.5-liter engine makes 376 foot-pounds (@2,800 rpm) vs. the Bimmer’s 350 (@3,700). That w ould argue for somewhat better launch feel for the Benz, despite its somewhat greater heft, and possibly a tenth or so in the 0-60 dash, for what that’s worth.

The BMW 4.6is uses a full-time all-wheel-drive system that normally sends 38 percent of available torque to the front axle, the rest to the rear, for a familiar BMW rear-drive feel. A planetary center differential does the negotiating when surfaces are less than ideal.

Power is transferred via a five-speed automatic transmission, which is “sport-tuned” in the 4.6is to produce more authoritative shifts at the higher revs the engine loves. It also gets a higher final drive ratio, which makes for speedier jackrabbit starts at the expense of a bit of fuel consumption, but at this price range, who cares?

It’s worth noting that this is the first vehicle I’ve piloted this year that qualified for the ignominy of a $2,100 gas guzzler tax. EPA ratings are 12 mpg city, 17 highway. My 13.4 score reflected quite a bit of h ay driving plus some light-duty offroad adventures. To belabor what should be obvious, this extravagant chariot wants as much octane as you can give it – I can only imagine how it would fly on avgas.

The 4.6is felt surprisingly ponderous when I first set out in it, strange, because I remembered the 4.4 as downright perky. I soon learned that it wanted heavy throttle, to keep that tachometer over 4,000 rpm. The transmission happily obliged, holding shifts even on moderate throttle till 6,000 was coming up. The electronically-moderated shifter was quite apt at gauging both road conditions and driver’s intent, downshifting and upshifting nearly the same as I would have done manually. It is a Steptronic box, which allows the driver to take over and shift as desired with a mere flick of the console-mounted lever.

Gear changes were nearly imperceptible, even on the highway, where a desire to pass at 70 was translated almost telepathically into a lusty forward surge.

I wouldn’t want to drive this sort of vehicle at its rated 150-mph top speed, but must admit it just got better and better as legal velocities were left far behind. But what’s point? It would be great to get to Detroit from Cincinnati in under two hours, assuming one had a compelling reason to do so, but there’s a well-equipped establishment out there, complete with air force, to prevent that.

At legal speeds and country-road speeds, the X5 handled superbly, though the steering (vehicle-speed-sensitive in the 4.6is alone) seemed unduly heavy. The turning circle was nearly 40 feet, which made close quarters a bit difficult to negotiate.

Despite having what BMW calls “sport calibration,” the 4.6is was luxuriously comfortable even over bad surfaces taken too fast. Firm, to be sure, but in a reassuring, pothole-impervious way. I love those BMW brakes. They’re always a bit hard under foot and easily moderated. In this case, the hefty standard setup has been enhanced, with 14-inch ventilated discs up front, 12.8-inchers rear. Stopping distances were awesome, considering the mass involved. Some credit goes to the contact patch laid down by the 20-inch tires, which are 275/40s in front, monster 315/35s rear, and also the electronic brake assistance scheme, which senses an unusually rapid stab at the brake pedal and goes to full braking at electronic speed.

The X5 of course has, as do most luxury rides these days, a stability control system which goes beyond the traction control to keep the machine from spinning out, at least on high-friction surfaces. It was subtly effective when I tried to exceed the g-force realities on a tight curve.

The interior is quite plush for BMW, with luscious leather and wood all over the place. The 4.6is has the stereo upgrade, which otherwise costs $1,200, that transforms the Bose unit into one better than you’d find in most houses. All series get an in-dash CD player this year, in addition to the cassette deck.

The Insu rance Institute for Highway Safety gave the X5 top marks, labeling it a “best pick,” after crashing it into an offset frontal barrier at 40 mph. It got the maximum rating in every category, no doubt in some measure because of its 10 air bags (front, side, head curtain), which embrace front and rear passengers. The government has not tested an X5, but the IIHS test in considered more demanding anyway.

In IIHS’s 5-mph bumper-bending crashes, the X5 did creditably enough, in a relative sense, racking up $2,474 worth of repairs on all four tests, for an average of $619 per pole-kissing. It was bested only by the Acura MDX (average damage: $464) and Chevy Trailblazer: $611). Worst in class was an Isuzu Trooper, which suffered an AVERAGE damage of $2,958, for a total of $11,833. I think it’s ludicrous that these big, tough, macho machines incur any damage at a walking pace. Get to work, guys and gals.

A video accompanying the test machine affirmed that this is not a rock-climigo f-roader. In an instructional sequence, it showed an X5 cautiously creeping down a dirt road that a true Jeeper wouldn’t consider worthy of 4WD. But as a high-speed tourer and general-purpose dazzle-the-masses machine, it’s superbly overqualified.

Amazingly, the research concern Edmunds’ price surveys show even the 4.6is selling, on average, for $6,500 OVER sticker price. What recession?

At the nominal price of $68,945, gas guzzler penalty and freight included, payments – if you didn’t have the liquidity to buy one outright – would be $1,398, assuming 20 percent down, 48 coupons and 10 percent interest.