The new iX3 is BMW’s future: Is it any good?
This is the new BMW EX-3 and it’s the most important new BMW since I’ve been a motoring journalist. So, for quite a long time. It’s the very first of their new Neua class of vehicles which will be introduced. The next one will be the replacement for the 3 series saloon. You can’t have a look inside it yet. You don’t wait till later. This Neyer Classer idea represents a fundamental change in the way BMW is going to build cars. Crucially, the EX-3 doesn’t share its platform with an internal combustion engine car like the old EX-3 did. From now on, every electric BMW will get an EV only Neya Classer platform. This unlocks some game-changing tech, more range, and it should make it more fun to drive. Also, a large part of the Neyer class of vehicles are built from recycled materials such as these plastic bottles. Is that annoying? And most importantly of all, the EX3 showcases BMW’s Neya classic design language, which has got keyboard warriors on the internet going, “Are they right, or does the EX-3 represent a bright new future for BMW?” Let’s find out. The first thing I thought when I saw this car was, do you know what? From the front, this really looks like the concept. Does, doesn’t it? We have this really cool light design here, and you can have different welcome animations. I’ll show you some of those now. And then you’ve got this smaller kidney grill which is reminiscent of the No Classer from like the ‘ 60s and ‘7s and stuff. The original Neuer Classic cars were a range of sporty BMW saloons and coupes from the 1960s. Their tall vertical grills were considered a bit weird back then, but despite this, they helped save the company from financial disaster. Now, BMW is reinventing itself again for the electric age, and it’s chose to honor the original Nea Class of cars by using similar vertical grills on this EX-3. Despite their eye-catching illuminated frame, these grills aren’t just for show. They also contain loads of sensors for the car’s driver assistance tech. Moving down the side here, we’ve got air breathers to smooth air flow over the wheels, improve the aerodynamics. Really important, of course, on an electric car. Then down here, this is your lower grill for battery cooling, which can shut if you don’t need any cooling, but you need improved aerodynamics. Now, if you look at the bonnet, you’ll notice it’s recessed here. This helps smooth the air flow yet again. And it looks kind of cool as well, doesn’t it? Biggest thing to note, though, is this. BMW have redesigned their logo. They’ve been much better at it than Audi have. In the past, you would have like a chrome round the propeller and it be divided up with chrome as well. And the chrome was very shiny chrome. Here, they got rid of the chrome in the propeller. It’s just divided by by little segments. Kind of reminds me of Lego in a way. I don’t know why, but I like it. Also, the chrome is sort of like smoke chrome. Good job, guys. Right, moving down the side. Alloy wheel sizes go up to what are these? Are these 21s or 22s? 22s. And these are like the arrow wheels. So, they have like this plastic covering here in between the spokes to help once again reduce drag, improve air flow. Moving down the side, this is where I’m a little bit disappointed compared to the concept car that seem to have slightly more angular sides. This is a bit more rounded. It’s a bit of a shame because while I really like it from the front and it seems super modern, from the side it’s less wow. Now, one thing you do have though is pop out door handles, but unlike some other pop out door handles from other manufacturers, I do like the way they work. So, press that, pops out. You don’t actually pull on that. It just senses that you’re like putting pressure on it. It just opens the door. I like that. I also like the fact that we haven’t got some little cameras for door mirrors. These are proper door mirrors. Like a bit of old school. Okay. down at the bottom here. This side like kind of blends in and you got this crease here. In fact, I was speaking to one of the designers and they were saying that when we put a crease on the car, it’s a very definite crease. You can really see that over the rear wheel arches as well. Gives it quite a strong stance. Speaking of which, when you go to the rear, you will notice that it’s got quite wide hips, sort of Porsche 911y. Look, the people from BMW are looking a bit cross that I’ve mentioned a rifles brand. But what that does is one make it look cool, but also it’s apparently good for the aerodynamics. And something that’s really interesting is this. You see the way the these panels here is squared off that actually helps the arrow as well, which is allows the air to just break over the back of the vehicle. Now, like at the front, you have like this recessed area there. This combines with this to help the air flow over the back of the car. And you have a rear diffuser that these bits don’t do anything. They’re supposed to mimic Venturi tunnels. They do nothing. But underneath the car, it’s completely flat and it’s flat all the way around here, which once again improves the air flow, reduces the drag. At the back, we’ve got these huge tail lights. Once again, they’ll give a different signature depending on what you selected in the car. So, here’s a look at those. Overall, the drag coefficient of this car is.24 CD, which apparently is the same as an i4 saloon. Obviously, being an SUV, taller, you’re going to have more drag. So, it’s really impressive that they got it down to the same as that car. But this is how it compares to some other SUVs. Less drag means more range, and BMW says the EX-3 can manage up to 500 m on a full charge. That’s around 200 m further than the old EX-3 could do. But as well as new Aero, this car has a very clever battery. For starters, it’s huge, 180 kW hours, which is about the same size as you get in an i7. But it also has new cells that make it lighter and help it charge much more quickly. I’ll explain more later, but first, let’s check out the EX-3’s cabin. Visually, this interior is pretty special. It’s more wow than the exterior. So futuristic. The thing that makes it really futuristic is this clever heads-up display you’ve got there. Basically, what’s happened is you’ve got the windscreen with the black panel there. You’ve got quite a raised bonnet. So, this sits below the bonnet and you’ve got little projectors just projecting this stuff on the screen. Now, you can actually change some of the information on there, the stuff over to the right side because that stuff in front of you which has your speed and stuff like that, that has to be there by law. On top of this full widescreen heads-up display, there’s also a traditional heads-up display which actually projects things on the main part of the windscreen so you can look through it and see the road and read things like your speed and stuff. It just looks like you’re in a spaceship. To be fair, the information on there is pointless and it I could completely live without it, but it just makes this car feel new and different. Then we’ve got this new infotainment screen here. Interesting shape. I quite like it. You know, it’s better than it just being like an iPad. It’s very responsive. Look at that. The graphics are super sharp. It’s very fast. Yes, I know that they’ve got rid of pretty much all buttons. So, everything is done through here or by voice activation, which can be a bit annoying when you’re messing around like with the climate control. And yeah, you have to move the air vents about by doing this, which while cool is not as easy as going like that, is it with like a little knob, but it just looks cleaner. The design looks cleaner. Anyway, back to the infotainment screen. Big improvement over the previous BMW iDrive system. They sort of lost their way. It got super confusing. This one is much simpler. You can put various shortcuts on here like this. When you go into car, it’s got everything you need for your car, sorting out different settings and stuff like in one place. So, it’s much more intuitive and quicker to use than before. So, thank goodness for that. And one thing you’re going to be going into is this assistant systems. Turn off speed limit warning. Off. Off. Goodbye. Now, there’s other things you can do on here as well. You can connect to your phone wirelessly, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay. Overall, though, the system seems like a big improvement to me. What’s less of an improvement is this. You have touch sensitive buttons now on the steering wheel. I prefer actual physical buttons that you feel click. But these do have haptic feedback, which is quite clear, much better than haptic feedback you get on some other manufacturers steering wheel buttons. So, they really do vibrate. So, you know you’re hitting the right thing. And this does look futuristic. And the wheel itself is really cool. Once again, it’s a bit like you’d imagine you’d use to control some kind of spaceship. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. And thank goodness the quality is improved over more recent BMWs. The indicator stalks just are more damped than they are on something like the new X3 for instance, which is all a bit kind of like feels quite cheap when you operate that. And that matters cuz you touch this a lot and you want it to feel expensive. After all, it is an expensive car. It’s a BMW. Speaking of materials, generally really, really nice. All the materials that you touch higher up in the vehicle, this kind of fabric on the dash. I’m liking all of this. It’s only when you go a bit lower down and it feels a little bit more brittle, scratchy plastic, but it doesn’t feel cheap. Seats certainly don’t feel cheap. These are actually vegan leather. It feels really nice. There is no reason to have leather when this feels this good. And look, look at the headrests. Quite like this headrest. They move sort of like up and out. It’s interesting terms of storage. See, we’ve got some storage under here. Old school 12vt sockets still keeping it real even in this modern car. You got your drive selector there. Couple of cup holders, USBC’s there, and wireless charging. There’s a big storage area under here as well. There like that. And the glove box is quite small. Door bins are big though, so that’s nice and practical. One thing I have noticed is this vanity mirror. It’s really rather small. H. This isn’t small though. The rear view mirror. In fact, it doesn’t need to be anywhere near that big because the back window is quite small. Oh, look. It’s got a camera in it. That’s because if I hit that, we have a special security system. So, all the cameras around the car, you can actually start the recording and it just basically acts like an all round dash cam. And for security reasons, you can actually connect to the car via your phone app like you can with a Tesla and have a look around. So, you poking around your vehicle. Just look at this. Loads of knee room here. Head room’s really good as well. Now, sometimes with electric cars, you can find that because the batteries are underneath the floor, you end up with your your knees quite high like that. But here, it’s pretty good. You got good under thigh support. You can also stretch out underneath the seat in front. So, it’s very, very comfy. And you can recline the seat backs. Plus, look here. We have easy access anchor points. And as with many other BMWs, well, that’s your cup holders there for the armrest. Oh, no, that’s the assistant. Anyway, it hasn’t said anything. You have threeway folding seats. Down here we have the climate control. There we go. We’ve got two USBCs. Decent size door bins. We have windows that I’m sure won’t go all the way down. They probably stop about there. A little bit better than I imagined, but still not the best. And one thing that is a bit odd. While you have like these little things here where you can like hang stuff off and like fit a device which will hold your phone or iPad, there doesn’t seem to be any pockets on the seatbacks. You know how I said that unlike other electric cars, you don’t feel like your knees are too raised when you’re sat in the back seats. Part of the reason is because of what BMW have done with the battery pack. So, it’s actually a structural part of the car. If you look on the other side, that is the actual underside of the car. And if you look on the top side, you can see the mounting points for the seats. It’s clever. And what’s inside this new battery is pretty clever, too. BMW has moved from these square battery packs to these new cylindrical ones because it allows them to have higher power density. Right? So for every liter of battery, you can have more energy in them. Now being cylindrical allows them to achieve that without the risk of say if something goes wrong with the cell for it to have thermal runway and the car to burst into flames. Now the chances of a short circuit that happening is very very small. But due to safety regulations in lots of different countries, you have to minimize the power output of the battery just in case something like that happens. And when you have them square like this, if they’re all packed in, they can transmit heat to one another if something goes wrong. Whereas, if they’re cylindrical, each battery is touching lots of other batteries, so they can dissipate their heat if something does go wrong much easier without this thermal runaway happening. BMW has also increased the electrical voltage from 400 volts like the i5 to 800 volts like in a Porsche Tyan. This means the i3 can charge at up to 400 kW using DC fast chargers which is twice as quick as any other electric BMW. Now you can add around 230 mi of range in just 10 minutes. But that’s not the only clever charging tech you get with the EX-3. There’s a wide range of charging adapters you can get with the car, so you can get it to do different things. Vehicle to load can power large household appliances such as a fridge. Vehicle to home turns your car into an emergency battery to power your house in a blackout. And vehicle to grid means it can store surplus electricity from renewable energy sources when there’s low demand and send it back to the grid at peak times. But how good is the EX-3 at storing other things like luggage? You can get the car with an automated tailgate. Let’s see how good it is. Right. So sometimes they don’t work, but will this one first go? Yep. Right. Big capacity 520 L, which is 50 L less than the X3. But it’s not as bad as you might think, and I’ll explain why in a moment. First though, I want to show you this. Let’s take this out and this out. Give it a yank. Come on. Will it fit underneath the boot floor? I’m not sure that it will, but I’ve been told that it should. Really? Yep. really does look. Good work, BMW. Good work. Right, fold down the rear seats. Why haven’t they got releases in the boot? They haven’t. And it’s not there either. I’ve got to do a walk around. That’s one. Lock it into place. Do the other side. There we are. As you can see, with no load lip, it’s quite a smooth transition to the front part, but obviously it’s not completely flat, but it’s fine. And we also have some knittage and some tie down points. Where’s the 12vt? Must be in here somewhere. Where are you? No. No. I cannot find one. Now, let’s just check under the bonnet. There we are. Is there a front boot? Well, I know full well cuz I’ve been briefed. Yes, there is. The first on a modern BMW. Front front trunk or fruit front boot. This is particularly common in electric vehicles which don’t have a large engine occupying the front space and also in some rear engineed cars like older Volkswagen Beatles or Porsche 911s. Oh, don’t mention the competition. Okay, thank you Gemini. I don’t know why that just chimed in, but it did. But BMWs haven’t in the past, apart from I think the i3 ages ago, had a front boot. But here we are with 58 L of space. So when you add that to the boot capacity, your total trunk space on the EX-3 is ever so slightly more than the X3. The question is, do I try and sit in it with them sat there? What do you reckon, Louis? Yes, I can’t. It’s too cringe. I’m like a cat with an open box. Some of this extra fruit space was made possible by the EX3’s clever new electrical system. Rather than loads of separate control modules, it groups all the cars computers into four super brains. There’s one for the entertainment, one for the climate controls, one for the autonomous driving tech, and one for the stability control and driving dynamics. That last one is actually called the heart of joy, and it can process information 10 times quicker than today’s cars, which they claim makes the EX-3 feel like a proper BMW to drive. Now, I’ll be the judge of that when I get to test the car. But this software isn’t the only reason why this car should feel more exciting to drive than your average electric SUV. The IX 350 has two electrical motors, one on each axle. Being a BMW, can you guess which one goes on which axle? Yes, that’s the one for the rear cuz it’s got to have that sporty drive. So, yeah, you get the more power, the more expensive motor on the back, whereas the one at the front is there to add support, but it can do this thing that when it’s not being used, it can completely decouple. So there’s no drain and it doesn’t cause any drags. That improves the efficiency. In fact, these latest motors are 40% more efficient than the previous generation motors, yet they cost 20% less. It’s a win-win. In terms of power output, you have 470 horsepower and 645 new m of torque combined from the two systems. That’s over 70 horsepower and 65 more Newton m than you get in the X3 M50. It’s close to the 510 horsepower you got in the old X3M. Unfortunately, BMW hasn’t confirmed any acceleration or top speed figures, but it has said the new EX-3 will cost from just under £59,000. That’s about £12,000 less than a new X3 M50. And it’s almost £30,000 less than the old X3M. And part of this costsaving is due to BMW using some pretty unusual materials. The wheels are made from 70% recycled aluminium. The front boot cover is made from 30% reclaimed maritime plastics. The seat covers are made from recycled plastic bottles. Apparently, the new EX-3 is 42% lower in terms of CO2 for its supply chain. It’s quite a big drop. However, as with all modern BMWs, there are plenty of optional upgrades available. You’ll be able to get the EX-3 with this new MC. Let me just try it out. It’s very nice. Also, it’s on wheels, so someone could push you along in it. I’d like this at home. In fact, this is how I’m going to get about from now on. Can we go that way, please? Cuz I need to finish up with a verdict. Thank you. And that’s basically all you need to know for now on the new BMW EX-3. My first impressions, I like the design of the front. I like the rear. I’m not fully sold on the side profile. It’s a bit of a disappointment compared to the actual concept slightly, I guess. Love the inside. It’s like, oh, the tech in there. It’s great as well. It’s going to be really interesting to see what is the real world range of this car. How close can it get to those claim figures? We’re going to find out. And I want to try the heart of joy, the driving dynamics on this car, cuz it’s supposed to be really, really special. So to make sure you don’t miss out on that, subscribe to this channel. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next
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This is the all-new BMW iX3 – and it might be BMW’s most important car EVER!
It’s the first car built on the Neue Klasse architecture, with an all-electric version of the Three Series coming up next. So let’s take a closer look at the car.
Up front the most notable feature is the illuminated kidney grille, but given it’s an electric car, this is only used to hide the drivers assistance tech. Either side of the front end are air breathers to help with air flow, while the bonnet is also recessed, again to help with air flow. Along the side you’ll find alloys wheels that go up to 22-inches, pop out door handles, and proper door mirrors – no cameras here! At the back, the car is slightly wider than the front, once again to help with aero. There are large, long tail lights and a rear diffuser – although we’re not sure it does much!
Step inside and the iX3 has a super futuristic design. There’s a heads up display, which stretches across the length of the windscreen, showing all key driving data & important information you need while driving. On the dash there’s a huge infotainment screen which features BMW’s new iDrive system, and the cabin is made of soft touch, recycled materials. All-in, it’s a super nice car to travel in!
The BMW iX3 is equipped with a large 108kWh battery, which is good for a range of up to 500 miles on a full charge! It can also charge up to 400kW using DC fast chargers – this gives you 230 miles of range in just 10 minutes!
The iX3 comes with two motors – one on each axel. It comes with 470hp and 645Nm of torque. That’s over 70hp and 60Nm more than the X3 M50!
So what do you think – is this the best SUV BMW has ever made? You’ll need to stick with Mat and see for yourself!
