The panoramic roof that tints is a lovely touch, as are the asymmetric front seats that are more rounded on the door sides to make it easier to turn and chat in the front once they can turn on that Level 3 autonomous tech. This is precisely the wrong time to ask someone to take their eyes off the road, and certainly requires a redesign.īut it should be remembered that despite such things, the iX on the whole gets the details right. The BMW version, instead of relaying the live AR directions on to the HUD like in the Audi, asks you to look down at the centre console screen to see the live guidance overlay on the route. There are missteps, such as the AR satnav system, which tries to be like that found in Audi’s Q4 e-tron, where the car camera feeds attempt to tell you, for example, which roundabout exit to take rather than have you try and second guess an old satnav that’s running on a five-second delay. Sadly, most of us don’t have three-phase at home and you’ll be limited to single-phase 7kW – and that would mean 14 hours from zero to 100 per cent. All iXs have three-phase 11kW on-board AC chargers. However, on 50kW chargers, which are far more common right now, you are likely looking at around two hours for a charge in the iX 50. For both to go from ten to 80 per cent you’re looking at roughly half an hour. The iX 50 can take nearly 200kW, which means 90 miles in ten minutes. The iX 40 will take in DC at 150kW – or 60 miles in a ten-minute charge. Even with careless driving and using the air-conditioning you will easily get over 300 miles in this SUV.Ĭharging can be speedy, too. And we found a similar story regarding the iX battery. This is something we don't know from combustion engines – it’s a different story.” That’s impressive. I’m just one and a half kilowatt hours below. “It’s fully equipped, with the biggest wheels, so not set up for efficiency." The figure his iX gets after such a distance is 21.6kWh/100km. “What do you think is my energy consumption?” he says. Indeed, if you take a hair dryer to a scratch on this plastic panel you can speed up this process and watch for yourself, according to Johann Kistler, the iX project leader, a BMW veteran whose past projects include the X5, X6 and X7.Īs for that battery performance, Frank Weber, Development CTO on the board at BMW, at the launch of the iX shows a picture he’s taken of the dashboard data on his fully specced iX company car. And because you can repair stones chips on paint easily, but not on a piece of conventional plastic, BMW has used a self-healing material that will remove small chips and scratches from its surface as if by magic. This facade, which BMW is loftily calling the “intelligence panel”, could not be impenetrable metal, obviously, and so plastic it was. BMW has decided to hide all of this, camera technology, radar and other sensors necessary for Level 3 autonomy (hands-free motorway driving), behind a facade. Most modern cars have spaces and holes in their front to let the various sensors do their respective jobs. Smart.Īs is the cover for that beaver-tooth grille. This reduces weight and has the added bonus of meaning you can mix and match between different plastic sections and effectively make your wheels bespoke. In order to reduce the weight of the wheels, yet still make them as strong as is necessary, the decision was taken to make the alloys themselves unfussy and work a system whereby you can bolt on lighter plastic sections that look as if they are simply part of the original wheel. Once you get this in your head, the exterior, whether you like it or not, makes sense. This EV is intended to be the big brother to the superb i3, not an electric version of the X5. If you look side-on at an i3, then do the same to an iX, you can clearly see the connection. It is not trying to be like the X range, nor look like every other SUV. But in its defence the iX is by design unconventional.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |