BMW’s future has a face – a mouthless, floating head digital assistant avatar.
Like the dystopian love child of Paul from American Dad and Yadda from Star Wars, it hovers into view. And from March, it’s getting a proper AI brain.
Of course, conversing with your car is nothing new. It’s just that once BMW’s Intelligent Personal Assistant – IPA for short – is upgraded with Amazon’s Alexa AI capabilities, it will be able to talk back about topics other than the temperature or tyre pressures.
Yet the floating head is not the big story at BMW. The new iX3 is part crossover, part data centre, part rolling battery bank.
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It may look like yet another block-shaped crossover, but it represents a revolution. Yes, we hear that claim at every new launch, but this time there’s credibility behind it.
The iX3 is BMW’s first new car to be built on its new platform, the Neue Klasse framework. What’s more, it’s the first of around 40 new cars BMW says are coming to market over the next two years. Dealers better start clearing their forecourts. And it’s the entrée to the firm’s most important new arrival next year: the Neue Klasse 3-Series, the i3.
There’s no questioning the iX3’s sturdiness: this is a solid piece of styling, a BMW brick set on 21-inch alloys. Yet it moves with a deftness that defies its shape and size. It’s only in a tight multistorey car park that its hefty footprint becomes obvious.
Let’s tick a few boxes first. Spacious? Check. Ample boot space for golf clubs? Check. Room for three adults in the back, and two Isofix fittings for the kids? Check.
But under your feet lies the real revolution. The pack now comprises multiple cylindrical cells, like a pallet of D-Cell batteries. Of course, they’re not the same as the ones on sale in the local shop. And the benefits of this new format are significant, claiming to deliver 20 per cent higher energy density per cell, offer better thermal behaviour, are lower cost per kWh and are much easier to make.
It claims 30 per cent faster charging – up to 400kW on an ultrarapid DC charger – and most important of all, better range. BMW claims 805km on WLTP testing with energy consumption in the range of 16.7kWh/100km.
Are those figures realistic? The iX3’s usable 108.7kWh battery power saw us average 19.1kWh/100km on a mix of motorway driving, steep hill climbs and town traffic, with climate control eating over 10 per cent of our energy and the electronics a further 8 per cent.
So no, it probably won’t hit over 800km in the real world, but based on our driving, where we didn’t care about range conservation, you are looking at a range of 570km or more. That’s Derry to Kinsale, with 100km left to pop into Cork city for some shopping.
This time, the battery pack is not a separate box; now it’s integrated directly into the floor structure of the car, akin to how Tesla does it. That delivers stability. The centre of gravity is lower, so you get better body control and reduced roll.
To prove the point, we were let loose on the Ascari racetrack. Chasing a BMW M5, we slalomed around cones at 60km/h and hit 120km/h on a straight before applying full brakes while changing lane – essentially a version of the Elk test used in European Car of the Year judging.
BMW clearly set this up to showcase stability, and job done. Whether it’s the iX3’s centre of gravity or the magic of its stability control software at work, the end result is a remarkably nimble 2.4-tonne crossover, capable of hitting 100km/h from a standing start in 4.9 seconds.
The electronics are worth a mention. We were ordered to keep the car’s Dynamic Stability Control on at all times on the track, and it was clearly busy keeping the car in line through the bends. Trying to keep pace with the M5 brought moments where the DSC noticeably caught small slips before they became slides.
Why was this crossover a little tail happy? While the iX3 uses a 469hp (345kW) dual motor all-wheel drive set-up, its character is predominantly rear-wheel-drive. Most of the normal driving is handled by the rear motor, with the front motor kicking in when extra traction is required or when you floor the throttle.
All this is orchestrated by the ‘Heart of Joy’. Yes, it sounds like a lost Scorpions power ballad from the 1980s, but it really does set the beat at BMW right now.
Dubbed the firm’s new ‘super-brain’, this central control unit unifies power train, braking and recuperation, steering and chassis control under a single system. This replaces the old scattered architecture run off multiple control modules. Instead, you get one high-performance computer that BMW claims can process data 10 times faster than previous systems and has 20 times more operating power.
On the road, this translates to crisp steering and braking that’s up to 97 per cent done via recuperation. What’s more, a new “soft-stop” function brings the car to a feather-light halt at low speeds; so softly that passengers won’t notice or spill their champagne spitzers.
Another standout is the assisted driving system. It’s not ready to let the driver watch Netflix on the way to Galway, but it will let you keep your hands off the wheel indefinitely on motorways.
The new system will steer, accelerate and brake by itself. The trade-off is that the driver must keep their eyes on the road, and the driver’s face is monitored. This monitoring and requirement to remain in control pass muster in legal terms for EU driving, according to BMW.
The system is restricted to motorways and dual carriageways with speed limits up to 130km/h, and BMW is at pains to point out that this is not “self-driving” technology.
The eye-tracking system comes with an added bonus: to change lane, just glance at the wing mirror.
If the lane is clear, the car moves over by itself. Glance at the opposite mirror after overtaking, and it glides back in.
Off the motorway, the assisted drive system is equally impressive. Descending the winding roads from Ronda in southern Spain, stuck behind a wheezy bus and a dumper truck, the iX3 handled most of the steering itself. In the past, such systems were jerky on the straights and lost their bottle in the bends. Not with the BMW. It cruised along smoothly, sweeping through the apex of the bends like a local.
All this tech shouldn’t distract from what is, in essence, a very impressive car. Purists will baulk at all this tech, but for them, there are enough engaging dynamics to keep them happy behind the wheel. Is it mechanically engineered or digitally conjured? A bit of both.
For most folks, the most obvious attraction will be the sweeping information bar running under the windscreen.
BMW has delivered the most radical overhaul of its dashboard since someone stuck a tablet computer to the central console.
The “panoramic vision”, as it’s dubbed by BMW, delivers the usual array of speed, range and entertainment information, along with Sat-Nav directions. But it’s also home to the aforementioned alien, IPA. From March, with Amazon’s Alexa AI brain on board, it will happily debate the calories in a charging station Café Latte or the merits of the GAA split season.
If that’s not enough, there’s also a heads-up display, though it’s redundant given the proximity of the panoramic bar.
BMW has also revised the centre touchscreen, slanting it nicely towards the driver so that even the furthest icon doesn’t require you to stretch. All powered by BMW’s new Operating System X, which is impressively responsive and intuitive.
We’ve criticised previous BMW cabins for pointless gimmicks like Gesture Control – the daft ‘wiggle your finger in the air’ party trick that seldom worked. The iX3’s interface is a vast improvement and arguably the company’s most coherent interior layout in decades.
It’s not all perfect: the steering wheel controls are cluttered, and the backlit cloth panel across the dash is, frankly, naff. But neither spoils a car whose main ambition is still to be enjoyable to drive.
For €73,925, you are getting a lot of car and cutting-edge tech. At that price, it’s also coming in below the price of rivals like the Audi Q6 e-tron and Mercedes EQE, while delivering substantially better range. It may be undercut by the price of the Tesla Model Y, but again, it has better WLTP range, a much better cabin and is far sharper to drive.
And then there’s the floating head. Will it be our new BFF? Or will it drive us to distraction? BMW’s first Neue Klasse model boasts so many impressive innovations and talking points that owners could quickly become barstool bores. At least the Alexa-powered IPA gives them someone – or something – to talk to.
