BMW iX xDrive40: The boogie Beemer

The iX has gone so far out of its way to look funky that BMW’s design supremo admits he thought most people wouldn’t like it.

Distinctive: the BMW iX xDrive40

I don’t want to sound like an old grump who’s got the hump, but it’s unavoidable, so here goes: am I alone in bemoaning the fact that every modern European car seems to be obsessed with creating a cabin ambience that hovers between 1980s video-game arcade, Tokyo karaoke bar and tweenager’s LED-littered bedroom?

Those lighting options might seem diverse, but that’s because vehicles like the new Mercedes-Benz EQS, the even newer Range Rover and the “so new it looks like it’s arrived via Tardis from the far future” BMW iX don’t just come with one option for interior ambient lighting, they give you more choices than your local paint shop, and even allow you to turn your cabin into a disco on wheels by strobing between the various lurid tones.

I blame Audi. In my mind, they started the whole thing by giving their classy cabins a touch of light piping a few years ago, just a tasteful bit of blue or green, maybe yellow, and now I’ve just spent a week in a BMW iX that emitted a fairy-floss pink from the window sills, making me look, to passing motorists, like a galah.

And there’s no doubt people were staring, because the iX is an electric vehicle that’s gone so far out of its way to look funky and future-fab that BMW’s design supremo, Domagoj Dukec, admitted to me that he thought most people wouldn’t like it. “For the moment it looks different, or strange, but you know how it is, the more you see it, it starts out as one-of-a-kind, then it becomes more and more lifestyle, more hip, it turns up in a few music videos, and people will start to drive it because they want to be part of it. I think in two or three years there will be a lot of X5 customers going over to iX,” he explained. I’m sorry, music videos are still a thing? I had enough trouble explaining to my daughter the other day, as we sat in a pseudo restaurant that was playing MTV moments on TV screens, why music was best represented in a visual fashion by women gyrating half-naked around fully dressed men with snarling faces and gauche awful jewellery. If something as visually arresting as the iX had rolled into shot, I think I would have been lost for words, for once.

Speaking of sparkly things, BMW’s Dukec says he’s particularly proud of the iX’s interior, which strips away what he calls unnecessary “jewellery”, such as timber and aluminium trim, and decorative lines. And it’s true, minimalism is the new piano black in car design, particularly with EVs; it’s as if someone has decided that our lives will soon be empty of automotive noise, so they may as well be empty of everything.

The multimedia system control in the BMW iX

The thing is, one of the iX’s most notable design features looks like actual jewellery – the volume control, central command mouse twiddler and even the seat adjustment buttons on the doors are made out of “cut crystal glass”, which refracts all that interior lighting (and even sunlight) like a set of tiny disco balls.

Even weirder than that, and the alarming exterior design – which features a faux grille that looks like one of those fiddlesome stickers you get on expensive Lego – is BMW’s effort to reinvent the wheel. Concept cars have long featured joysticks and yokes and squared-circles instead of steering wheels, but until now they’ve not really made it into production cars.

I don’t know why the shape of the iX steering wheel – which resembles a Munich beer hall pretzel – weirded me out so much. Perhaps it made me hungry. It also felt like I’d borrowed one of those driving simulators that boring people have in their spare rooms, and was playing a particularly realistic video game.

From the rear

Then there’s the sound of the doors when you shut them, which is normally a pleasing highlight of BMWs. To save weight, the iX is built around a carbon fibre exoskeleton (yet the car still weighs 2.5 tonnes), which is obviously a very expensive way of doing things, and more often seen in supercars. As such, it should sound lush and high-quality when you shut the doors, but unfortunately it just feels a bit thin. Still, the carbon inner bits look very cool, if you’re nerdy enough to notice.

On the plus side, it does make for a stiff, sporty chassis; the iX is firm but fabulous to drive, and surprisingly involving for a family sized SUV. And the steering, through that weird wheel, is properly beefy BMW spec.

The iX’s digital display

Being an EV, you’ll want to know that the entry-level iX xDrive40 I drove has two motors, good for 240kW and 630Nm, and a range of 420km, but you can step up to the xDrive50, which gets a bigger battery and a more useful 620km range (it can also hit 100km/h in a swift 4.6 seconds – 1.5 seconds faster than the xDrive40).

It’s fabulous to drive

Both cars come with five years of free recharging through the Chargefox network, which might take some of the sting out of the price – $135,900 for the base model or $169,900 for the fast one – but not much (there’s also a crazy fast M60 variant coming for $222,900).

At least I have worked out which music video the BMW iX should have appeared in – Blinding Lights.

Fast facts

BMW iX xDrive40

ENGINE: Twin dual current excited synchronous motors (240kW/630Nm)

ECONOMY: 22.5kWh/100km

TRANSMISSION: 1-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $135,900

STARS: 3.5 out of 5