![]() ![]() It was very hard to get a sense of how much grip there was and to tell how connected it was with the road. As I selected Sport mode and took the iX on a heaving country road with oddly banked corners and hairpins, the iX went comfortably numb. I speak from firsthand experience.Īll those underpinnings make the iX sound like it’s going to be a back-road stormer. The iX’s rear-wheel steering makes it feel like a much smaller vehicle to maneuver, and in tight city streets the hair-trigger maneuverability back and forth is useful and precise if you have both hands on the wheel but a little touchy and nervous-making if you’re looking back on a toddler. My test iX totaled $101,020, and one of its many options was the $1,600 Dynamic Handling Package, which adds a rear air suspension, adaptive dampers, and rear-wheel steering. Its approximately 5,700 lb is portly compared to many gasoline SUVs, but somewhat slimmer than comparable EVs, even while packing more battery. The iX is built around an aluminum space-frame body, incorporating carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) for strength and rigidity in specific places-like around the doors and hatch, where they’re visible-without adding too much extra weight. Further, the Comfort Access feature, which locks and unlocks the doors automatically, was on high alert, locking the car even when I walked around to the charge port to plug it in. While they offer an excellent seal from wind noise, their mechanisms (inside and outside) proved finicky, and you have to learn the pacing of them. But the execution of iX doors is strange whether you’re inside or outside. The frameless doors give the iX some of the design panache of a coupe-it’s the first BMW SUV to get them, and I suppose we can be glad BMW didn’t attempt a version of the i3’s suicide-door layout. From its perplexingly big, bold face to its incongruous surfacing, quirky frameless doors, and visible carbon-fiber body pieces, the iX makes no aim at universal appeal and “normal.” It’s for those who want The Future to look like nothing else, and to pack all kinds of technology that makes it collectively feel like nothing else. The rear motor not only has a higher output than the front (335 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque, versus 268 hp and 250 lb-ft of torque) it’s geared significantly lower than the front for stronger launch characteristics, while the system can depend more on the front motor in cruising.įirst, the design-oddity part. The dual-motor system makes a combined 516 hp and 564 lb-ft of torque in our test xDrive50i. It packs all the pieces of BMW’s in-house-engineered fifth-generation EV propulsion system, including a 105.2-kwh pack, with prismatic cells set into modules. Looking past all the levels of quirky-which I’ll get to shortly-the iX easily makes the honor roll as an electric vehicle. ![]()
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