The inner sybarite

Now I’ve had it for two weeks, and clicked (silently) over 1,000 miles, I think I can offer some early ownership thoughts. Most of these miles were with a full load of passengers and cargo, and a few were with bikes on the towbar, so it’s had a fair workout. And it’s done very well.

I think I’m still looking for the sweetest spot in the driving position, which tends to take me a while in any new car. I’ve settled for now on quite a low setting, which surprised me, but it still gives decent thigh support and stays comfortable on a long drive. I’m not missing the overshaped lumbar bulge of the Comfort Pack the demo car had, but would perhaps appreciate a tiny bit more bulge there. I’ll try reclining a little further next time, but it’s not bad at all. And the blue fabric upholstery is just great; couldn’t be more pleased with that. I drove it in shorts for the first time today and it’s certainly preferable to leather for that.

It rides very softly, but not in a sloppy way and not to the detriment of cornering. I think, if it were firmer, I’d still back off some corners because of the sensation of the sideways forces required to re-route 2,400kg (plus n-hundred kg of occupants) rather than because of any deficiency in the chassis itself. At any speed that won’t frighten the family (or the sheep) it corners very well. But it hasn’t tried to be a ‘typical BMW’ and is a better car for that bit of thinking.

I did notice one odd thing: the micro-scale surface on the Dales roads is generally pretty good, but some of them have an underlying texture I’d call ‘corrugation’ and the iX wasn’t entirely happy with this. At 35-45, it just jiggled a little uncomfortably, and it was only on a few roads. Once we were out of Wensleydale on the way home, I didn’t notice the sensation again. The iX may be magical on air suspension, but that wasn’t available to me and what I have is really very good.

It does feel big on a Yorkshire B-road, on which you can tell where the white line used to be from where the brambles either side meet in the middle. But so would just about anything. I met one double-wheeled tractor and found the hedge was just about compliant enough to let it pass. And I got better at parking it too, once I found that turning off the excellent (in forward motion) Auto Hold feature makes reversing much smoother. I’ve yet to take up any of its offers to manoeuvre automatically for me; I might want a couple of hours alone with some hay bales to get confident enough for that.

Loading up for a holiday yielded the familiar anxiety attacks and complaints that the car was all wrong, but they faded as everything duly went in. The boot is a bit strange, its width reduced by the carbon arse-cheeks and the auxiliary rear lights, but it’s a good shape and usefully tall. The rigid load cover seems an odd choice, possibly a nod too far to the i3, especially as there’s nowhere to put it if you choose to detach it. I may look into a stretchy retaining net to give the option of loading a bit higher.

I did all the driving to and in Yorkshire, but everyone else took a turn in the back seat and was (remarkably) full of praise for it. It’s not just the space; the view out is excellent too, helped by the plain rear glass and the slim front head restraints that leave a big gap for the passengers to see through. (Nobody missed the expensive glass roof that I didn’t order.) But it’s such a big gap that it gives them too good a view of the big info screen, and they (some of them anyway) seemed to fixate on it. One called it ‘distracting’, although what there is back there to be distracted from I have no idea. It’s just fine to drive next to.

But this comment compounds the feeling the screen gives, when I try to use it, of too much going on, and only Boy1 mastered the task of co-driving with it. I may still not have found the ideal layout for it, and there’s a whole shortcut menu I need to configure that may speed things up. What it shows is very clear, but it isn’t consistent in where it puts certain important info. For example, the little box that displays distance and time to destination and remaining charge on arrival may be on the left or the right, depending on what else is in use. Some of the screens also seem optimised for left-hand-drive, so the important bit is farther from my eyeline than would be ideal. But this is probably true of all modern cars; I doubt many are re-screened for the RHD market.

But I love the head-up display. It’s so good that I barely look at the instrument cluster for speed, and the superimposed direction symbols before and at junctions are just wonderfully intuitive. (Except the one that looks like a cricket ball. Haven’t worked that out yet.) I’ve not tried it at night, so can’t comment on brightness, but in daylight it’s a where-have-you-been-all-my-life feature.

I may have discovered one undocumented feature. I’ve done my best to turn off the devices that make the steering wheel fight my inputs but it still occasionally does, as when moving back to lane 1 without offering a (superfluous) signal. But not always then. What I think it’s looking for is ‘evidence of deliberateness’, because if I grip the wheel correctly enough to have two fingertips in contact with the back of each of the pads at 10 and 2, it doesn’t protest if I don’t use the indicator too. If I waft sloppily leftward with one hand in my lap, the wheel wriggles in my other hand. I’m actually quite impressed by this as a safety feature.

Charging was generally easy enough. I’m already getting BMW pricing at the scarce Ionity chargers (much more numerous in France, which is an incentive to go there) even if I have to wait till next month for the ‘Plug & Charge’ link-up that will recognise the car and my account when I simply plug in. We’d probably have made it home on the 92 percent we picked up at Leeds but took on a just-in-case slurp at Fastned on the edge of Oxford. That was excellent, the slickest stop-plug-pay-charge-go experience I’ve had anywhere — although it’s at the Park & Ride bus station, which is a bit light on amenities if you want more than the 8 kWh I took.

As for managing an EV in the Dales, yes, it took more effort than was ideal and showed the value of destination charging — which will surely become much more prevalent in the next few years. But it didn’t change or determine any of our plans. There are a surprising number of 22kW AC chargers — enough to cause me a twinge of regret that I didn’t take the 22kW option with the car — but 11kW is fine for a top-up on a day trip. And you’d need only a slightly longer range than the iX has — especially if achieved through efficiency rather than brute battery size — to have a very easy time of it, even today.

As for efficiency, it’s OK, in line with expectations. 19 kWh/100km at fairly generous motorway speed (between 50 zones) from Leeds to a tea stop in Coventry, and much the same overall for the week. After a full charge at home, it’s showing 260 miles today. It can’t match the i3, of course, nor several other, more modern EVs, but not many of them would match it for comfort on a trip like this, so I’ve no complaints. Looking back at my audition list, it’s a better EV than its rivals from Audi and Jaguar, and better for space than the Ioniq 5 and EV6 (and it has a rear wiper.) The iX3 is fine but lacks the wow-factor. And the Polestar 4 still lacks the actually-possible-to-buy-one factor.

Lots more to do, of course, including some routine commuting and maybe even some business travel, plus the York trip at the end of the month. But so far, it’s serving its purpose of offering enough comfort and sense of occasion to keep me from missing the CLS, without the environmental twinge I felt every time I turned the key. I look forward to getting into it, which has to be a good sign, right?

I typed it in another app over several sessions and pasted it in. Didn’t look that big at first, then I saw it here and it seems huge. Well done if you managed to read it all!

Not quite. His height is an anagram of mine.

Any washing machine is (reasonably) kind to the environment if you use a low enough temperature. (Unless it runs on heavy fuel oil, of course 😛)

Our new dishwasher can be controlled by Espadrille's phone... bonkers. Do we really need that?

Final piece of data for now. 767 holiday miles cost an average of 16.3p in electricity. That’s only about 3p less than the CLS would have cost, but this was an exceptional trip that we’re unlikely to repeat more than once a year, relying mostly on expensive DC charging. And I’m still paying 22p for my home units, until the E.ON wheels click round enough to activate my 7p overnight price.

The 79p Donington Gridserve stop was a miscalculation. The merest slurp there would have got us to 59p Leeds, and taken a penny off the overall average. But the humans needed a longer stop then, even if the car didn’t, so I suppose it was efficient in terms of time, rather than money. I’ll get better at matching charging providers to catering options as I do more long trips.

York in two weeks will be easier. We can get a slurp at our lunch stop near Coventry that will get us comfortably to York, and there’s ample 40p AC charging one street away from our apartment there. Should be a good trip.