BMW iX3: The Most Important New BMW… EVER??
Welcome to the rebirth of BMW. This is the new EX-3 and it is the Bavarian brand’s most important new car in 60 years. Their words, not mine. Why such a big deal? Well, because it’s the first car of the Neua Classer, the new generation of BMWs. And this very car in the next 2 years is going to spawn 40 new or facelifted BMW products. So it’d be awkward if it sucked then, wouldn’t it? Should we find out? Our three YouTube channels on EVs and clean tech are funded by our fun-packed test drivetastic events in Farra, London, the Southwest, the North, Melbourne, and Sydney. Next up, we’re in Canada for Everything Electric Vancouver. And new for UK viewers, you can now buy a battery EV or more at everythinglectric.store. Right kids, no time for tom foolery or hy jinks today. We have to jump straight in. There is so much to talk about. When BMW says all new, they mean all new. There is nothing on this car that isn’t really, really new. Not just the stuff you see, the design language, the user interface, the interior, that is all new, but also everything you don’t see. The platform is new, the battery pack is new, the software system that controls the ride and the handling is new. The ADAS system is new. The approach to procuring materials for the car and assembling them is new. It’s completely groundbreaking. It is nothing short of a reinvention of what a BMW product is. And do you want some good news early on? Based on what I’ve seen here today, it’s pretty astonishing. Now, just a very, very quick bit of scene setting before we get into this. It’s worth noting BMW are doing pretty well with electrification so far. In the UK, about a third of the cars they sell are EVs. That’s really, really strong for a legacy car brand. And they’ve made some lovely stuff. I’m a big fan of i4, i7, iix. very nice cars, but they are flawed because with the exception of the EX, they are based on a multi-energy platform. And actually calling it a multi-energy platform is being generous. They are petrol cars that have had the engines ripped out and some batteries pushed in is what they are. And that comes with limitations. You don’t get to access the full advantages of electric vehicles when you build electric vehicles that way because they’re not proper electric vehicles. On top of that, BMW’s EVs have been very, very expensive compared to the ICE cars that they are mostly based on to date, but all that changes here. This is a bespoke electric vehicle from the ground up, and it’s pretty competitive on price as well. Now, let’s start by having a quick talk about the design. It feels almost fasile to be doing a design walk around where there’s so much new stuff underneath. But there is also an all new BMW design language to talk about and I rather like it. The words that they keep flashing up on the screen in the presentation are timeless, modern, and reduced. That last one’s interesting, isn’t it? I feel that might be code for we may have got a bit carried away with the giant kidney grills and we realized if we kept going in that direction, our cars would just end up being two massive holes. So, we’ve paired it back a little bit. And that’s what they’ve done. They’ve paired back their design language. That previous generation of BMWs, they were quite shouty, big old faces. The chap who designed those, he’s been quietly moved over to Rolls-Royce, where enormous grills are very much encouraged, and they’ve moved to what I would describe as a more classic approach to BMW design. So, we still have the kidney grills. They’ve just shrunken down a little bit and the surfacing is so much cleaner. Just less creases and wrinkles and lines and details, just less stuff. If you look at something like an i7 or an i, there’s just so much going on and not all of it quite coheres and it’s quite jarring to the eye in my opinion. Less is more and I think this is proof of that. Notice no chrome at the front whatsoever as well. That’s all been replaced with lighting. I’m personally still coming to terms with the whole lights around the grill situation, but let me live with it. As we move to the side, the biggest compliment I can pay it is it’s unmistakably BMW. Long bonnet, strong shoulders, muscular, squared edges. If you think about the Mercedes EQ cars, bars of soap, there’s nothing to connect them to the history of the brand. This even someone who doesn’t really know cars might well be able to identify as a BMW. And here’s something to be cheerful about. Look, it’s a new SUV and it doesn’t have black trim around the wheels. Yay. Actually really like these kind of boxy swollen arches you get instead. Can’t say I’m as sure about these wheel designs with uh fake spokes. Uh we had fake exhausts on cars, then fake grills. We’ve got fake spokes on wheels now. There you go. But glad to see that it has arrow covers. Glad to see that aerodynamics have been uh considered in the design. It’s not just all about making it look like a classic BMW. And it’s not just the arrow covers. There’s an air curtain so that it flows over those wheels. There’s a nice uh openable, closable air intake at the front. We’ve got something called the air blade on the D-pillar here, which they’re very pleased with. All of this improves the car’s drag coefficient to.24, which they say is the best in its category. Notice again, no chrome or trim pieces around the window sills. Less is more, right? Just noticed this as well. Little bit of shark nose E24 action going on from the side when you look at that nose. Do you see it? I see it at the back. Nothing groundbreaking, but again, less is more. Not as many creases and lines as we’re used to seeing in BMWs of late. Nice to note, proper SUV. None of that swoopy coupé stuff. Good news for headroom. Good news for boot space. Goodness me, they’ve really let their hair down with the brake lights. Look at those. If you rear end one of these, you are not going to be able to say, “But your honor, I didn’t know he was breaking.” On the whole, design-wise, huge improvement in my personal opinion. I’m not immediately smitten by the way this thing looks, but I like it an awful lot more than what we’ve seen from BMW design department in recent years, and I think the real proof will be in how it looks on the road in the real world. Anyway, that’s enough about design for now. There is so much more to talk about. I’m going to blitz you with some tech stuff. Then we’ll have a little brain break, play with some toys in the interior, and I’m going to blitz you again with some sustainability stuff. Okay, big brain time. Strap in. We’re going to talk about the platform and the battery because it is pretty remarkable. I’m going to glance at my notes on my phone. I will be doing this exam open book and I’m not accepting feedback on that decision. Okay. Right. Here’s what you need to know. Bespoke EV platform, all new for this car. Up until now, the only electric BMWs that used a proper EV platform were from memory i3 and iix. All the Neyer Classer EVs will use proper EV architecture. Worth noting there will be petrol and hybrid cars in the Nea Classer. They’re going to look the same but have a different platform underneath just like what Mini have done with the new Kooper. Same situation here, but encouraging that the electric car is the one they launch with. hopefully is an indication of where BMW’s priorities are going forward. Anyway, battery pack is all new and it’s very fancy and they’re very pleased with their cylindrical cells. Let me tell you about those. This is a patented BMW technology and it does a few things. First and foremost, they reckon it’s a packaging game changer. They can just fit lots more battery into less space. Additionally, because it’s a cellto pack battery, normally batteries are a bunch of cells arranged into modules and then you put the modules into a pack. They cut out the middleman here. It’s just a bunch of cells. And when you get rid of that extra thing in the middle, again, you can just fit so much more in. It’s also allegedly really great for costsaving. BMW reckons they’ve saved a fortune with this cell to pack battery and have invested that money into different areas of the car while knocking some money off the price. More on that shortly. What does that all actually mean in plain English? It means this. The battery pack in this car is 20% more energy dense than the one in the previous generation of i3. It’s a little bit bigger and it’s a little bit heavier, but it’s much more battery. The old one 75 kWh usable. This one 108 kWh usable. Again, only slightly bigger and heavier. That is astonishing. Also worth noting that battery pack is structural. This is celltofloor design, which means if you locked out the battery, you would just be staring at the ground. The battery is the floor of the car. That’s good for so many things. It’s great for stiffness and rigidity, which is good for handling. It’s great for weight saving, which is good for handling and range and efficiency. It’s great news for your feet because when the battery is the floor, the floor can be lower. So, you have more room for legs and that. And additionally, when you have more leg room, you can bring the roof down. And when you bring the roof down, you improve aerodynamic efficiency. Again, good for range. The battery, by the way, 800 volts now, 800 volt architecture, which means they can do up to 400 kW charging speed. Very nice. And I’ve talked about efficiency a little bit. There is a massive emphasis on efficiency with this car. They haven’t just chucked in a huge battery and gone, “Good job, us. There’s your range.” They’ve been clever with it, too. So, thanks to the car weighing less than its predecessor, thanks to new motors, which are more efficient than their predecessors, thanks to all the aerodynamic improvements and a bunch of other stuff, too, this car they reckon can do 4.1 m per kowatt hour in the real world, which I mean, huge if true for a car this size. That’s what I was getting from the Renault 5 when I was driving it, and that was impressive then. But with that battery pack, that would mean a real world range in the vicinity of 440 miles. BMW says the WLTP range is up to I’m always a bit dubious about up to, but up to 497 mi, even if it’s nowhere near that big range. Worth noting also, they’ve hugely increased the amount of computing power that this car has, as you’ll notice inside in a moment, but they’ve done so without increasing the demand on the batteries. And there’s an all new thermal management system for that battery pack as well, which BMW says is going to hugely improve range loss in really, really cold weather. So, that’s the battery. Goodness me, if it was just the new battery in the old car, I would still say it’s pretty remarkable. But they haven’t stopped there. Before we move on, let’s just do some other sensible stats. This is a dual motor car, the launch version. 345 kW, naugh to 60 in 4.9 seconds. plenty. One assumes that uh entry level model is to follow with a smaller battery pack, single motor, rear wheel drive. But this version, this version BMW says is around 10% cheaper than the existing entrylevel BMW i3. All of this new tech, the new battery pack, the extra battery, all the stuff inside we haven’t even seen yet. And it’s significantly cheaper than the outgoing car. I don’t have the exact price as I stand here today, but by the time you watch this video, I’ll have been told it. And I’m going to magically have Future Jack tell us the price now. Future Jack, how much does it cost? They still haven’t said. There you go. And will Arsenal win the league this season? No. Damn it. BMW has radically changed the way the electronic control system of this car, its brain, interacts with the physical hardware, with the motors and what have you. Typically, you’ve got lots of little mini brains doing different jobs. You’ve got one for the traction. You’ve got one for the steering. You’ve got one for the suspension. In this car, one superb brain. It’s actually got four super brains, but one of them is dedicated entirely to ride, handling, driving. And it’s called the heart of joy. It can compute and make decisions over 10 times faster than its predecessor. And it’s so flipping clever that it actually renders physical hardware like a limited slip differential, rear wheel steering redundant. It can essentially simulate those pieces of technology simply through the way it interacts with the front and rear electric motors and how it gives and takes away power. It’s really complicated. It’s so complicated at one point during the presentation a man used the word elastokinatics. Huh? But what you need to know is this effortlessness, agility, and lightfootedness. That’s the end result. According to BMW, they don’t really want you to understand how clever this car is. They want you to get in it, go for a spin, and think, “Wow, this car makes me a good driver.” So, that sounds promising. I’m very excited to see what all of that’s about. Genuinely, a man spoke for 10 minutes about steering feel at one point during the presentation, which is so wonderfully BMW, and I can’t wait to feel that feel, but we can’t today. So, we’ll stick a pin in the handling stuff just for now. Let’s instead talk about the ADAS, which is normally the most boring thing in the world, but genuinely some of the most innovative, exciting ADAS pieces of technology I’ve ever heard of featured on this car. They’ve done all sorts of clever little things to ensure that the safety tech isn’t intrusive or irritating. a silent companion. It should be, says BMW. So, a couple of examples of that that I really like. Number one, let’s say you’re in full-on cruise control mode. The car’s doing speed. It’s following the car ahead. It’s keeping you in lane. You’re doing nothing. Just tweaking the wheel every now and then, but you see ahead the road’s getting a bit tasty. A few lovely corners are coming up. Normally, you have to turn off the cruise control, take over, do a bit of driving, and then when you’re done, cruise control back on, hands off. With this car, you can just go in. You can just take over whenever you like. Put your foot on the accelerator, start steering. The car goes, “Oh, over to you.” And when you’re done, just lean back, cross your arms, and the car goes, “Okay, back to me, I guess.” Mad. And here’s another seriously wacky one in terms of lane assist. And this, I mean, amazing if it works. Remains to be seen. But here’s what this car can allegedly do with its lane assist. Lane assist is very good if you fall asleep at the wheel and start veering into oncoming traffic. handy, but it’s very annoying when you’re driving along and you want to overtake a parked car and the car goes and yanks the steering wheel back into the path of that parked car. Less good. Allegedly, the new EX-3 can tell the difference. It’s studying your face using cameras. It’s studying your eyes, the movement of your head, and it can ascertain, oh, he’s nodding off. He’s veering into the oncoming lane because he’s falling asleep. I’m going to nudge him back into his lane versus, oh, he’s overtaking someone on purpose. He’s checked his mirrors. He must want this. It can tell the difference and it knows when to intervene and when not to. I mean, extraordinary if true. I do worry about this cuz I’m a sleepy boy. I’ve got a sleepy face and I often get told to take a break by cars when I feel perfectly fine. So, I feel my face will be the ultimate challenge of that feature. We’ll see soon. And then just one more amazing if it works type of feature. Uh the charge flap. BMW reckons that you will never have to touch this charge flap because again it knows when you need it or don’t. When you park up and come round to the boot of your car to get your shopping out, it won’t open. But when you park up at a charger, even if your navigation wasn’t set to a charger and you walk towards it, it’ll open. It’ll know that you want to charge. How? How will it know? I don’t know. We’re going to test. We’re going to I’m going to The whole video, actually, when I review this car, we’re going to skip the rest of it and just do the charge flat for 20 minutes, I reckon. Let’s have a look inside. [Music] Okay, that was a lot. Well done you. Well done you if you’re still here. Well done me. Well done all of us. Let’s talk about this interior and then more tech, I’m afraid. Where to begin? It looks interesting. The exterior design quite paired down, quite subtle. They possibly didn’t get the memo in the interior design department. Some jazzy choices in here. Look at that screen. It’s slightly wonky. That’s fun. I guess the steering wheel. Yeah, I think part of me wants to say sort of i3 reminiscent, fun, interesting. Most of me wants to say it looks like the sentient steering wheel in the movie Wall-E that tried to uh kill humanity. I think uh there Yeah, it’s quite a lot. And it does have haptic buttons instead of proper buttons and I’m slightly disappointed about that. But maybe they’re good ones. We’ll find out once we’ve lived with the car for a little while. What else? Well, lots of recycled materials. We’ll talk about sustainability in just a moment. But these seats feel really nice and soft. I like this textured fabric across the dash. I like the way that the doors flow into the dashboard. It’s all very cocoony and round and soft and relaxing. Driving position really, really good. I’ll tell you something I love about BMW. Look how far out this wheel comes. That is brilliant. As someone with really long legs, I can never quite get the wheel out far enough for my long lanky legs. I can in this car because that sort of stuff matters to BMW. Likewise, the seats are great. Just a nice amount of hugging without being properly racy bucket seats because that would be absurd in an SUV. We’ve got lots of storage in the doors. That looks like it would fit a nice big bottle, glove box, very nice wireless phone charger, cup holders. Nice, useful storage down there. Plenty of cubbies. No, this is nice. No piano black anywhere in terms of fingerprint smudges. You’re going to have a hard time creating any in this interior. That’s very nice. Right, that’s your break from the tech talk. Back to the tech. Let’s talk about this user interface. It is really, really interesting. So, central infotainment screen. Slightly on the piss. Not sure why. Looks kind of cool. Uh, it’s telepathically quick. It’s one of the most responsive touchcreens I’ve ever used in a car or outside of a car. It looks beautiful on this screen. Quite intuitive to use from my brief few moments swiping around and playing with it. I like this. no conventional gauge cluster. Instead, we have a panoramic headsup display. And this is really, really interesting. There’s a weird depth thing going on. It looks slightly 3D. And also, it looks like the screen is kind of halfway down the bonnet. It’s really cool, I have to say. Essentially, a gauge cluster right in front of me, just below my ey line. And then the rest of it, the other two/3 can be whatever I want it to be. So, right now, I’m in maps mode. I’ve got my map there and my coordinates there. Very important to have your coordinates at all times. Or I can change it to dynamics. And now it’s showing me my power and my torque and my battery temperature for when you’re, you know, sending it and what have you. But the most interesting one to me is personal because this is completely configurable. So I’ve got six widgets essentially across that panoramic HUD. Now, that’s a fun sentence. One moment, darling. I’m just customizing the widgets on my panoramic HUD, but I am look at this configure. I can delete that and I can say I want my weather next to my gauge cluster. The weather is very important to me. Next to that, I’m going to have the date and time, I think. And then I’m going to have my little personal AI assistant chat. He can go there. That’s good fun. And it’s not just tech for tech’s sake. What this does is invite you, the driver, to spend very little time here, eyes forward on the road, and everything you need is just underneath your ey line. That’s really, really smart. And in addition to that, we’ve also got augmented reality, so it’s going to beam your directions on the road ahead. I’m told it works very, very well. So, very rarely will you, as the driver, need to go into the central screen, take your eyes way off the road, which is a growing issue in modern car design. And it’s great to see someone tackle it. Okay, back seat jack test. No trickery, no cheating. This seat is all the way back in my driving position. Not even that slightly forward position when I’m accommodating rear seat occupants. Full recline. And that is wow. Okay, that’s really actually very properly impressive. Huge amounts of leg room. What I immediately notice is how low that floor is. No knees up here like you often get in electric vehicles because the battery is the floor of the car instead of being attached to the floor of the car. It’s so much more leg room. Tons of headroom, too. Wow. It’s very, very roomy. Final thing worth talking about today is sustainability, cuz that’s another massive, massive emphasis with this car. And it’s not just a case of, oh, the floor mats are made from water bottles. They are, but there’s a lot more besides. In fact, BMW reckons 740 kilos of the material that make up this car is secondary, is recycled. That’s about a third, which is hugely impressive. In terms of the lithium, the cobalt, the nickel, about 40% of that is recycled. In terms of the interior, it’s all mono materials. Lots of PET everywhere you look. Really does feel nice. We’re getting so much better at making recycled plastic not feel plasticky. Equally impressive, however, is that BMW aren’t just talking about using recycled materials. They’re talking about future recyclability. Making sure that this car can be recycled in a way that is highquality and makes sense financially. So, what does that look like? Well, ease of disassembly. Building the car in such a way that it can be taken apart in a more straightforward fashion. Use of monomaterials, for example, very helpful for that. Also, simply using less components. Another really, really key way of ensuring a car is not just recyclable, but it makes sense to recycle it. It’s worth your while to recycle it. The last time I heard a brand talking this much about recyclability at the end of a car’s lifespan was the Fiser Ocean launch. Not many legacy brands are putting this much emphasis on not just utilizing secondhand materials, but making sure that the car goes on to live more lives in future forms when you’re done with it. And here’s a really, really bonkers number. 13.5 tons. That according to BMW is the amount of CO2 created by each i3 that rolls off the production line. Now, here’s why I’m slightly struggling with that number. Pstar, who have been the poster child for sustainability among car brands for a long time, they quote the Polestar 4, their greenest car at just under 20 tons. For this to be that much less is literally unbelievable in my opinion. I’m not saying BMW are making it up. They have very detailed reports on the life cycle and sustainability of every single model they make on their website. You can go see it for yourself, but there is no standardized method of measuring these things. So people will include certain things and not include certain things and it’s hard to compare brand to brand. But in any case, what is very apparent is that it’s a huge emphasis now going forward. Sustainability, recyclability are going to be absolutely baked into every Neyer class of BMW and that is wonderful to see. You know, I tend not to draw too many conclusions about cars until I’ve got my hands on them on the road and been left to my own devices for a few days. But I’m pretty blown away by this on first impression. New design language, very exciting. New interior, new user interface, all good, all very cool. But in terms of the battery, in terms of the software, in terms of what a leap forward this thing is for BMW in those departments, they’ve skipped multiple generations here. I don’t just think this car brings BMW up to speed with the front runners, the Koreans and the Chinese in terms of the EV stuff. I think in certain ways it puts them out in front if indeed it can do all the things that they say it can. It really does feel like BMW’s skipped a generation and gone straight into the future and yet it arrives in a package that looks familiar, that looks like a BMW. I think that’s going to be really really key to this car’s success as well. Very interested to know in the comments what you make of this, the new EX-3 of the Neuer Classer. By the end of this year, it’ll enter series production. We’ll get our hands on it. and we’ll find out for ourselves if it can live up to the astonishing claims that BMW have made about it today. But for now, let us know what you think. Do make sure to like and subscribe and if you have been, thanks for watching. Now, visit electric vehicles.expert where you can follow everything electric and keep current with clean technica, the driven, electric, and many more.
Welcome to the rebirth of BMW. Jack takes a first look at the all-new BMW iX3. and this isn’t just a facelift; it’s a full-blown reinvention.
From the design to the tech, everything has been reimagined. It’s modern, and yet unmistakably timeless. But does it live up to the hype? Let’s find out.
00:00 BMW iX3
01:45 BMW EVs
02:50 Design
05:00 Aerodynamics
06:20 EV Platform & Battery
09:15 Efficiency & Range
10:45 Statistics
11:30 Hardware
13:10 Safety Tech
15:20 Charging
16:00 Interior
18:10 Tech
20:20 Rear Seats
21:10 Sustainability
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