BMW iX3 prototype drive: your next-gen EV is nearly here

There’s a fight for control going on inside the cockpits of many modern cars. Enable all the active safety systems in a Tesla, and it’ll do most of the steering for you. But if it makes an errant turn or meanders a little too far this way or that in the lane (and trust me, it will), you’re left wrestling the wheel out of Autopilot’s virtual hands.

Assistance systems from other manufacturers do better at ceding control whenever you feel like taking over, but BMW is about to take that to a new level with the first car built on its upcoming Neue Klasse platform. It includes an advanced driver assist system that the company says is a proper symbiosis, where the car’s sensors and systems don’t fight with or yell at you but instead work with you to make driving safer and less stressful.

I sampled this suite in a prototype of BMW’s iX3, the first electric SUV on the Neue Klasse platform, designed from the ground up to offer more range, better handling, and way more smarts. BMW is promising 400 miles of range from a new battery architecture that can charge at up to 400 kW. That means adding something like 200 miles of range in 10 minutes, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

At the core of the iX3’s safety system is a computing platform that BMW calls a “superbrain.” That’s an evocative term for a Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride chip, but it does offer far more power than anything the company has put on the road before. That’s paired with a more advanced sensor suite, with better cameras and higher-fidelity radar sensors, all combined to give a better view of the world around.

One of those key sensors is the driver monitoring suite, which can detect where you’re looking and whether you’re paying attention while behind the wheel. Plenty of cars offer some degree of monitoring like this, usually nagging you with beeping and blinking unpleasantries when your eyes linger on a roadside distraction for too long. The iX3 goes beyond that by using eye-tracking technology to not just complain, but actually improve your experience.

If you’re driving down the highway and BMW’s highway assistant is active, it’ll steer itself and even change lanes. In some current BMWs, you can just look in the mirror to initiate a lane change. The iX3 takes that a step further by proactively putting on the turn signal for you should you take the wheel and change lanes yourself.

Yes, finally, a BMW designed to tackle the most common preconception about BMW drivers: they never signal before changing lanes.

Try to change lanes manually without checking the blind spot, the lane-keep assistance system will resist the change and try to keep you where you are. But, if you’ve looked first, the car won’t resist your control at all, as you’ve proved to it that you’re doing your part.

The car will detect your attention in other ways, too. I had a chance to drive next to a dummy pedestrian standing partially in my lane. Without any input from me, the car came smoothly to a stop. But, when I tried again, steering slightly to the left and showing that I was paying attention, the car allowed me to move out of the lane without resistance.

Smooth driving, smoother stopping

I also got a chance to sample the other brain inside the new iX3, which the company has unfortunately labeled “Heart of Joy.” This in-house developed processor aggregates all the traction, stability, and electric motor management functions that are typically handled by a dozen different processors sourced from a dozen different suppliers and scattered throughout the car.

Unifying all that has some significant implications. The car can more quickly and seamlessly manage power to the dual motors that give it 400 horsepower and all-wheel drive, so when I was sliding the camouflaged prototype around a wet test track, it felt like the stability and traction control systems were working to help me, rather than just trying desperately to slow me down.

But when it was time to pause the action, something almost magical happened. On a test track, I was told to close my eyes and let the iX3 bring itself to a stop. That process of deceleration was so smooth that I genuinely couldn’t tell when the wheels had stopped rolling. The new systems controlling those electric motors allow more precise application of the regenerative braking function. That not only means smoother one-pedal driving, but the kind of perfectly controlled stop that’ll keep your passengers from getting jostled at every red light.

Ultra-smooth stopping is a small thing, but it really does increase the comfort of driving around in the iX3. By the end of the day, I was blown away by everything BMW’s new EV brings to the table. And that’s on top of the big, dashboard-spanning Panoramic Vision display, which runs from one pillar to another to provide a customizable and interactive information display.

The big question, though, is whether any of this will be enough to convince the largely EV-skeptical luxury car buyers out there that all this is good enough to finally make the switch away from internal combustion. The company’s gas-powered X3 is consistently one of its top sellers, and while that isn’t going away, BMW clearly has high hopes that the iX3 will bring that kind of sales success to its battery-powered efforts.

But it’s just the first of multiple models planned on this Neue Klasse platform, all with the same combination of tech and finesse. If they’re successful, maybe the world can finally put that BMW blinker stigma to bed for good.