BMW iX Review

​Practicality and boot space

The iX is a big old car, and there’s a good amount of space inside as a result. But the emphasis is on luxury and avant-garde design rather than outright practicality, so while the boot is generous – with a lower floor area for storing the charging cables, in lieu of a frunk ahead of the windscreen – and the rear seats able to fit three abreast quite neatly, you’ll be spending more time admiring the materials and ambience than the sheer size of the space you’re occupying.

BMW has thrown out the rulebook here. The steering wheel is more hexagonal than circular, which takes some getting used to and might make your arms feel a little odd in your first few miles. Buttons are used sparingly but are made of wood and glass where they do appear. You can also have a sustainable cloth trim rather than leather; whether anyone goes for it, given how much resale value drives the speccing process of big luxe SUVs like this, is another question. We dare you to be different though. The rest of the car certainly is…

Technology

While the screens and iDrive software are familiar, you operate them with a glass dial for a feeling elevated above any other BMW, the i4 electric saloon included. The touchscreen is huge – so big that you can have several ‘windows’ open at once rather than just having the nav display and nothing else. The digital dials are hugely configurable, though good luck finding traditional instruments. BMW – perhaps rightly – suspects the buyers of a big EV tech-fest don’t want them.

While buttons have mostly made way for touchscreen commands, you’ve other options here – voice control or the ability to scrawl out handwritten letters on the glass dial, which we find a really useful form of inputting nav addresses. Perhaps even handier is the fact the phone link-up feeds into the driver’s dials and head-up display, allowing your choice of maps software to be properly utilised – so few people do this stuff with such conviction. An even neater touch? To save energy from the climate control, certain portions of the interior trim on the dashboard and doors heat up to gently warm the cabin in a more efficient manner.

Safety

Yep, Euro NCAP has no qualms about throwing £100k SUVs at its immovable testing wall, and the BMW iX came away with the full five-star rating. It scored especially well for protecting its adult occupants, with a 91 per cent score, and it did well for its active safety systems too. BMW includes Driving Assistant Professional as standard – the fancy name for a bunch of systems that include lane-keep assist, steering intervention and front-collision avoidance, as well as a smart cruise control system that takes over and stop and go traffic. Park assist systems are reasonably priced extras, which given the sheer size of the iX, we’d not be able to resist adding. BMW’s also worked very hard on artificial sounds – buddying up with Hans Zimmer, of all people – to make the iX a more natural sounding vehicles for those in and outside its luxurious cabin.