The inner sybarite

I quite like tractors 🚜

Comparing 1.8 tonnes of Korean engineering suspension and 1.6 tonnes of Swedish engineering, the Koreans don't understand comfort. It's very stiff in a bumped up mini SUV/crossover in comparison to a midsize saloon.

I'm not sure how German engineers have managed to rewrite physics after thousands of years. Mass is mass.

If 2.4 tonnes is the new tonne then we shall see. The new BMW M5 is already being panned by BMW aficionados for being so heavy (ignoring the panel gaps between the rear doors and wings). 259 miles from (what size battery ?) is hardly progress. I get 280 miles from a four year old 64kWh battery.

Lovely car but I'm not getting excited if that is what has been achieved in four years.

Wow, glad you like it WDB. Happened fast. May it give you many years of unimpeachable service and pleasure.

It does look green though.

Thanks Vić. Not sure about the green but it does tend to pick up colours from the surroundings, so perhaps the big hedge across the road has an effect. But for MrsB1’s input, I’d have gone for the definitely green-tinged Blue Ridge but this is nice too and works well with the shape and the black details.

Clever feature I hadn’t understood before I ordered is that, although the standard car I have doesn’t get memory buttons for the seat positions, those positions are stored in the driver profiles, which can in turn be associated with a specific key. So MrsB1 and I can do as we do with the i3: each use one key and get our preferred seat position along with phone connection, radio presets and the like.

It also does the clever thing the i3 has: a double-press to unlock (no keyless entry on the standard car, which is fine) drops the window glass halfway so there’s less to sidle around in a narrow opening. But this time it’s on all four doors. I like frameless windows.

The lightweight (down, BPG!) structure means that the doors don’t have that bank vault heft that Mercedes owners like, but it all feels solid, and I’m getting used to the half-second delay while the door decides whether to let me open it. I could have paid extra for soft closing, as I could have for a lot of other things, notably the 105 kWh battery in the 50. But it feels such a well-sorted car that it doesn’t need all the clever extras to work.

Well, that was unexpected! I had some DVLA documents to drop off at the dealer and Boy1 came along for the ride. And he was impressed — with the smoothness and the space, if not with the Zimmer whoompf on takeoff. (He found the menu option to switch that off.)

He shares my slight regret that we have MrsB1’s preferred grey to the blue-green (there was one of those at the dealership) but we’ve rationalised that the silly faux grille is much less conspicuous on the grey car, and that the grey leads nicely into the blue interior, which is still my favourite thing about it.

He reminded me — in case I’d forgotten, which I hadn’t — that he’d advocated for most of our time with the CLS something taller to optimise the space for rear passengers, but accepted that, until this (and possibly the Enyaq) that meant a horror like a Verso or an Espace. Nothing car-shaped had a flat floor that left room for feet. And I don’t think we were ever going to be an X5 or XC90 family. (I rode in a new XC90 the other week and wasn’t over-impressed by the space.) So here we are, too late to undo the family road-trip grumbles of old, but with something modern and effective, even if it is on the big side.

First big outing yesterday for the long holiday journey to Wensleydale. Usual pre-departure angst about fitting everything in. Boy2 and I sat in the house and let the two fretters-in-chief enjoy their little worry-storm while the car gradually swallowed everything they offered it. It was fine. 

And it is a very good machine for a long trip. Some US owners seem to feel the steel-sprung car, like mine, is too firm but I’ve no idea what they can be comparing it with. I have the CLS as a reference, which rode very comfortably over most surfaces but would occasionally be upset by really nasty broken stuff, possibly because of its 35-profile tyres. This is on 50s and the difference is enough to turn square waves into gentle undulations, even over the kind of pothole you see just before you hit it, giving you half a second to think, this is going to hurt. So far, at least, it hasn’t. 

It’s quiet too — near-silent, in fact, now that Boy1 has found Hans Zimmer’s off-switch. The noises are kinda fun but the ride is better without them, certainly when the car is full. He found the off-switch for the speed warnings too, which were getting a bit silly. There are separate sliders for adjusting the tolerance at low and high speeds, but they don’t help much when the camera reads the constructors’ ‘5’ limit in the middle of the M1 roadworks and takes it literally. Very glad it did no more than bong a bit. 

We need to find some more off-switches, though. There is simply too much going on in the main display, and much of it is stuff that ought to be kept well out of the way while the car is moving. I think there’s a configuration that will make it very easy to use, with the three apps I mainly use — nav, audio and trip data — in a 1+2 window arrangement that lets me rotate one into the big window as needed. I need to set it like that and just leave it. 

The 266 miles consumed bang on 90 kWh, which is pretty much in line with expectations, if perhaps at the low end of mine. Overall altitude gain was a modest 125m, so I can’t really plead I was travelling uphill. It was mostly into the chilly wind, though, and the temperature barely reached the teens all day. I still think this car can do better, and the BMW data community, to which I have been readmitted, seems to agree that my efficiency so far is below par for a 40. I’ll be able to check again on the way home. 

I learned a bit about charging on this route on the March trip in the i3, so I experimented a bit this time. The iX comes subscribed to Ionity’s premium service, but the only unoccupied Ionity charger at MK wasn’t working. Didn’t matter, we still had plenty, so we had a charge and pasty stop at our old friend Donington Park. This time we used a 150kW unit that really did deliver that much, meaning that we left with a full tank rather than the mid-80s I’d have been happy with. That meant we still had 64 percent when we got to Skelton Lake outside Leeds, but I was determined to get some Ionity bang for my buck. The chargers were all in order but I had to get the BMW app to make the connection — disappointing when the iX was telling me it was registered for Plug & Charge, which should have recognised it automatically. Network settings still propagating, I hope. 

Still had 60 percent left on arrival, which will cover a few local days out and still get us back to Leeds on Saturday. A full Ionity load there ought to get us home, possibly with a very small boost at Donington, MK or Fastned at Oxford. 

So overall, it’s been a really good maiden voyage, especially considering I wasn’t expecting to have the iX for this trip. I don’t think I’ve got the driver’s seat quite right yet, but it’s not far off, and the car generally is starting to feel like mine. And it has a rear wiper, which I used a lot in the first half of yesterday’s drive. I think I might have been quite cross in a car without one.