BMW iX3 Review: A Disappointing First Step into the EV Era

[00:00] The BMW iX3. This brand has invested over nine billion dollars a year since 2023 to 2025 on a

[00:18] whole slew of ground-up new vehicles and over the next six years you're going to see the results of all of that work and when I'm talking about that type of expenditure it's brand new platform, electrical architecture, new factories, new battery, electric motor, gasoline variants.

[00:34] So across the board we're going to see a completely different brand and different philosophy. We're going to talk about that in this video. We're going to take this in the shop and talk about the technical changes and take it for a drive. And one thing I'm going to promise you, this is going

[00:46] to be a brutally honest look at this car and this brand. We've asked BMW for engineering support on this new platform for the better half of a couple years and we got zilch. So I'm backfilling it with with a lot of research and data that I've done to pick that for what it's worth.

[00:59] We're going to start with the iX3. This is their first new vehicle on this platform, and it's electric only. Of course, there's going to be gasoline variants as well on this coming up very soon. This starts at about $60,000, and you can kind of spec it out with the different M Sport packages,

[01:14] but this is a 50X drive version, so all-wheel drive, dual motor, and you can kind of get this up to around $70,000, which is where I'm at right now. Now, before we talk about the interior and exterior, a big thank you to James Horton and his team at Anderson, Mazda, and BMW in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

[01:31] I've bought several vehicles from them over the course of the years, and I love the fact that they're honest about what they can do and can't do. They'll tell you right off the bat they don't have the biggest inventory, and they can't give you the deepest discount. But they want to make you happy, and hopefully you come back and buy multiple cars.

[01:43] And that approach is very, very rare. They've also loaned me this iX3 so I can kind of keep the reviews going. So, let's talk about the exterior. This is more of an evolution, at least on the side profile, from the previous generation iX.

[01:56] This is also slightly more aerodynamic in terms of slipperiness, but the big changes are the front and the rear. The front has ditched the big grille era to their retro throwback style grille

[02:08] that is going to look good on some cars and others not so good. I think this smaller SUV doesn't do it any justice. The back is the traditional, let's wrap around the entire taillight structure across the back.

[02:20] It looks a very Chinese market car. And when you get in this vehicle for the very first time, that's what you're going to notice. It's very tech forward. I feel like this was designed and engineered in an age when every brand was doubling down on China being their primary market.

[02:33] And now that that has dissipated and sales are down about 30% in the Chinese market, I don't know if this is going to come back to bite them in the ass, at least in the United States. Now, as an electric car, this design is going to carry over into their gasoline vehicles as well.

[02:47] So for a mainstream vehicle, I don't know what people are going to think. But what I can tell you is there's some good and bad in here, and let me get started. The door panel is a massive improvement from what they did on the X3, this current generation X3.

[03:00] Ditching some of the plastic, the touch-sensitive stuff on the door, it feels much higher quality. This is a door panel that's a perfect example of how you do engineering to keep it simple, keep physical controls, and have a timeless design.

[03:12] And there's a great way to do different material stripes from upper, middle, and lower, including speaker grills so they can scale this out to luxury products or to more commodity style luxury products and it looks good. I wish they were taking this philosophy in the rest of the

[03:26] car because if you look at this dashboard this is what I was talking about. This is a race to the bottom tech focused luxury experience that's going to age like a bowl of diarrhea. They have this projected display across the upper dashboard that gives you all of this useless information that

[03:40] you're going to wind up minimizing it down to very very few things. If I was a dealership I would definitely turn all of that off before a customer gets in there and add it back and show them that you can add it versus remove it. The updated infotainment stream is now bigger, right? Because

[03:55] we have to have bigger streams. And it is much better in terms of menu consolidation, the usability. It's just tacked on with everything else here. This to me is an example of when they're talking about cutting costs and trying to raise margins and cut costs, this is how you do it.

[04:11] This dashboard is a perfect example of how to cheap out everywhere. I had a passenger get in here, and my temperature was overall cold, and they didn't want it cold on the passenger side. They're like, oh, I just want to move the vents away from myself so they don't have air blowing on me.

[04:24] Can't do that. No, they've got to have them tip-tap in a screen to move the vents around. Another trend that many modern vehicles are doing and manufacturers are doing to have everything electronically controlled. I understand, again, cost-cutting and trying to simplify installation and manufacturing,

[04:40] but as a usability part getting rid of all these physical controls are just shit. It just doesn't feel good. It doesn't look good. It's not going to age good and this is not a luxury experience. The controls on the steering wheel are just doubling down on that as well. BMW typically

[04:54] had really clicky good controls. Now they're moving to haptics and touch sensitive. That has a delay in haptics. That's the only way you know and unfortunately because the buttons on the steering wheel are also so close together from track selector to the phone call button I'm

[05:08] constantly hitting the wrong button because you can't just do it by feeling. You literally have to look, defeating the entire purpose of physical controls on the steering wheel, and it just looks awkward. The wheel is just, it's just different for the sake of it. I know this might be hard for

[05:20] the Europeans to understand this complaint, but this is one of my biggest issues with this car is usability. If you look at the old generation X5, I could drop a 24-ounce water bottle reusable in the door, no issue. The iX, same thing, plenty of storage. You get to this car, I can barely put

[05:35] the water bottle in there. The center console space of the iX3, dominated by phone storage and charging. You want to use the cubby below? Well, the seat's in the way. It's hard to get at. And you got to remember, people are not buying this for $60,000 to go canyon carving. It's their

[05:51] primary usage case for a family vehicle. So you need storage and usability over the technification of things, like the door handle design. Again, back to the X5, one of the best proximity keys in the business. He pulled the handle you're in. Then they moved to an electronic door handle in

[06:06] the iX. Okay, you can still deal with it. This car, now you got to wait for door handles to pop out. It's just this constant de-evolution of things that have worked in the favor of technology.

[06:18] And that technology, the cool factor is going to wear off after two weeks of using this. And you're going to want to find places to put things that you're not fighting with. The packaging in these German cars has increasingly gotten worse over time. The other thing that's changed for a bad

[06:31] way is some of the alerts and reminders for certain things. For example, the seatbelt chime looks like they studied Toyota and said, how can we make it even more abrasive and annoying?

[06:43] I'm sitting here with the door open and I put my foot on the brake. It's like, hey, why don't you put on your seatbelt? Well, why don't I close the door first and get in the car? But the best part about that is it will beep and let you know that your seatbelt's not on, but I can drive away with

[06:58] my driver door open and it won't beep for that. So there's little things like that that they need to patch out in over-the-air updates and clearly this was designed to be a connected guard first. In terms of everything else it feels like a traditional BMW experience with the change of

[07:11] the massaging seat options which massaging seats in BMWs were never good. This isn't much better but it is a different strategy. It's more of like an ergo motion seat where it's trying to reduce fatigue by pushing in different bladders much more deep and moving you around so you don't

[07:25] your body's constantly moving so it doesn't get uncomfortable in that same position. So I do kind of like that. It's better than just having air bladders kind of moving on you pointlessly. The back seat is pretty comfortable.

[07:37] But again, like, this is basic BMW stuff. This isn't about a high-end experience. It feels more commodity car overall. That's the biggest thing against it, is I feel like this is no different than what you're getting from Hyundai and Kia

[07:49] in terms of material selection, material choice, diversity. I feel like a lot of the other brands have caught up with this where this is not much different to justify its $60,000 price tag, even compared to its EV competitors like the R2 and the Model YL.

[08:03] The rear cargo space is pretty good. They've been able to re-sculpt the back of the car for more storage underneath the floor, and the seats do recline a bit in the back in the second row. But the one negative thing that Jack found immediately,

[08:15] unlike the Lexus NX and a lot of other vehicles we test, there is a gap between the load floor and the back seats. and Jack had some stuff, a battery fall between the gap and gets stuck under the seat and you

[08:28] cannot access that. And the way that the carpet underneath the seats works is there's an open piece here for things to slide. So if you lose stuff in the trunk, it's going to literally go under the back carpet where you going to have to physically unbolt the seats to get things out It a total like engineering snafu to not put some type of blockage there because you can move the seat to get things out of it So you gonna have to be careful with little things or have a trunk mat to cover up that gap if you have the seats in a different

[08:54] position. But other than that this is a pretty quiet interior space. It is well built overall. It feels pretty solid for this first generation car, but again you have to be okay with this tech first philosophy compared to the previous generation BMWs. But I'm gonna head in the shop

[09:08] and hit you with all of the changes that this something has made in terms of manufacturing, design, and money expenditure. After I got rid of the scammer-influencer Priya, I started my subscription to Incogni to clean up my personal data off the internet.

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[11:49] Now the meat and potatoes. The new architecture that all these BMWs are going to be on is called Neue Klaas. This replaces the Klar architecture that we saw on essentially everything. And the transition away from that is to have dedicated platforms that were built from the ground up to be perfect for EV manufacturing.

[12:08] Not only good for EV manufacturing, but internal combustion versions of it as well. While reducing costs, reducing complexity, repairability costs, a whole number of things. It's a far less compromised package.

[12:22] Now, they did do the iX. The iX was a completely almost one-off electrification platform that used carbon composite, a different mixed material strategy. But the problem with it was it was very, very expensive to manufacture, and the repairability was much greater.

[12:39] This builds an open pack concept where the battery pack can be joined to the body that also creates a structural component to it. It's a structural pack. So all these improvements are leading them into reduced costs over time.

[12:55] As I started to talk about in the beginning, their R&D costs from 2023 to 2025 were roughly $19 billion to boot this up. Again, that's in the factory, tooling, engineering, design, the whole thing.

[13:07] It's not just the platform, but it's the broad scope of trying to do this. Their goal is to try to scale this out and have massive capacity to build a large number of cars, internal combustion, and EV while improving the overall drivability, the features, the range, the efficiency, you name it.

[13:26] There's about 4,500 different spot welds per body, 1,000 body shop robots, and they're using servo electric welding guns for the first time for this brand. They also use door laser welding that reduces the amount of adhesive.

[13:41] There's simplification across the board with this new platform. They report there's about one-third fewer front-end assembly parts and less variant complexity in joining hardware. Installation of segment and zonal wiring harnesses reduced assembly complication,

[13:58] and the overall wiring harness length is greatly reduced here. And a lot of that has to do with the philosophy of simplifying the ECU architecture, combining CAN bus and Ethernet using four main controllers or computers, ECUs.

[14:13] One for driving dynamics, braking, throttle, engine, or in this case, electric motor mapping. Dedicated to that, you have one for the infotainment.

[14:25] You have another for ADAS. So having specific ECUs consolidated for these individual components simplifies a lot, but it's also much more powerful. they can do more and that connection time between each part of the body is

[14:40] set up greatly and that's the whole point with modern ECUs reducing the wiring and the comm speed of them and Ethernet over some of these systems gives you immediacy between the control structure of the car because electric

[14:53] motors are instantaneous and as they evolve and become quicker to react depending on the design your connection between your foot hand and brake a lot of these systems plus stability control has to be lightning

[15:05] fast. So a lot of this modernization in terms of that part of the car is critical to this and the future generations of it as they get faster, more capable, and the sports car elements

[15:17] of it as well. The next major overhaul was their EV architecture. They are now on Gen 6. The changes from the previous, the old IS used a 400 volt pack that used prismatic cells. They are now using an

[15:29] 800 volt pack that switches away from that to cylindrical cells 46 millimeters by 95 millimeters high. This is also direct cell to pack integration to reduce complexity and increase the overall

[15:42] volume of cells. Again this is a structural pack in the car the use of foams and modern technology to get them to a place where yeah maybe they're sacrificing some replaceability but installation

[15:54] and structural integrity of the pack was more of the focus here, along with better range and efficiency overall. They're claiming the efficiency here is up by 20% compared to the previous gen.

[16:06] Now, that doesn't mean it's 20% better range, but the overall efficiency of the battery pack and electrical system is up quite a bit. Of course, range and efficiency are super important, but that 800 volt architecture also allows them now to up the DC fast charging speeds of 400

[16:21] kilowatts. Now of course that's a little bit misleading because it's super hard to find those and that charging curve tapers off at a certain point but the 1080 time is about 21 minutes and you have about a 110 kilowatt hour usable

[16:34] battery pack and that number could be skewed a little plus or minus. Essentially that's what you're getting. Updated battery pack, updated electrical architecture, updated electric motor design, it's been greatly improved in

[16:46] terms of efficiency and then the body structure improvements overall. Now the the ix3 gets strut front multi-link rear and this car's option there's no dynamic or adaptive dampers in this case so it's true steel spring and just a fixed damper rate and that's one of

[17:03] the things that i'm concerned about when i drive this obviously this could scale out like ix5 will get a multi-link front and a multi-link rear but overall one of the big things about this platform is you can tell even at the lower end this is the lowest end car that they're going to manufacture

[17:18] in this part and you can tell just the thought to design on underbody panels when you look at the suspension components the rear subframes aluminum just how smooth and precise all these panels fit together in terms of fitment thought to air guides the thought to the active shutter grills and how all

[17:37] of this feels like it's been completely designed together and not cobbled together to try to build something that has to be multiple things. This was all thought out from the start, and that's why this architecture will be around for a very long time.

[17:50] But as I talked about in the interior space, a lot of this platform is about cost efficiencies. They were able to drive down costs about 40% in the battery pack design here compared to the previous generation. Now, that's not like an audited bomb cost, but essentially, they're at least on paper advertising,

[18:06] they've been able to reduce costs across the board in terms of electrification and the internal combustion and also the building this platform at scale. So what that means is they're able to do more for less.

[18:18] Now, the question is, how does it translate to a customer and the driving experience? This is everything you dreamed of, Jack.

[18:33] The BMW iX3. The expansion joints that run up the logos on a roller coaster. Yeah, yeah.

[18:45] It sounds just like it, too. So I spent a lot of time in the interior and in the shop talking about what this is, the platform, all the business nonsense. At the end of the day, somebody that's looking at this car,

[18:58] and to be fair, I wanted to approach this because this new platform is scaling out. This is BMW's new platform that's going to scale across their entire product lineup, electric and gasoline. So this is our first look at it at the starting point,

[19:11] the most affordable EV platform or EV car that they make. So what is it like, in your opinion, what they did and spent all this money on does it translate? I think its biggest problem isn't its traditional competitors.

[19:28] Like if you compare this to the smaller or lower-end Audi EVs or the lower-end Mercedes EVs, sort of the core iX3 competitors where you look like Cadillac Lyric or, you know, any of its traditional moniker competitors, it's a fine car.

[19:47] Its problem is it's competing in a space where people are looking at things like the R2, the Model YL, and both of those cars are vastly, vastly superior vehicles in basically everything other than maybe peak efficiency.

[20:03] the YL is wider than this is. It honestly, at least in my short time on the car, returned better efficiency. Maybe not total range, but per mile per kilowatt hour.

[20:17] It drove better from an input side of things. And most importantly, it self-drove, which this is not going to be like a M BMW where it's the driver's car. It's going to be transportation pod.

[20:29] That's a better transportation pod. Self-driving mostly works. If you look at the R2, the R2 dynamically, fastly superior. It rides better, it's quieter, it has much better steering, better driving inputs.

[20:42] Nothing will do power flies, it will go off-road. It is a fun vehicle to drive, interesting looking, and, starting next year, has full self-driving. And they cost effectively the same. That's the problem this car has, is I feel like this was being designed once up over a ship,

[20:58] they did not drive well in at least the iX3 so many of the decisions were made for a world that did not turn out to be the way the world was in 2026 and 2027

[21:10] I mean I couldn't sum it up any better I think the result of the driving experience this feels to me on roads like this when you're just doing this because that's what people are talking about. It's a pod

[21:23] it feels like a car that has the chassis dynamics and feel in the isolation of like a $30,000-$40,000 car. I feel like it's a combination of weird oscillations and frequencies that make us wait until the steering wheel in a bad way

[21:39] of stumping out of an older Hyundai and here. So explain what that means. So like you know if you're going over payment here's some expansion things. This is a really good example. These are these like high frequency low amplification little tiny things. What it does is mostly damps out those

[21:55] vibrations through the seat, but what it has is these oscillations, these uncontrolled vibrations that don't tend to stop, and you feel it through the steering wheel the entire time. Combined with that, this is some of the lightest steering that I've ever experienced out of

[22:07] a new car. It almost feels like steer-by-wire. I mean, there's such a dead zone in the car before it responds, and just in general, it feels so lightweight that this would be a perfect car for somebody that is really able

[22:19] or is having a difficult time, maybe elderly, that has no harm. What I think the elderly, I think the young people are crazy. Yeah, no, but that's the counterintuitive part about this car,

[22:31] is what they're trying to target, I'm not quite sure what they're trying to benchmark here, or what they're trying to compete with, because to your point, R2, YL, in terms of what we're doing right now, far more compliant, far more comfortable, far more quiet,

[22:47] and the refinement level is so high here, this feels like they totally missed the boat of having all of this tech, designing it tech-forward, and then it's the loss for the luxury shops, the isolation shops,

[23:00] the ride-quality shops that people want here. And then on top of it, you go through all this tech point, and then you can't compete with the electric car companies that are doing self-driving and some of the driving assists as well as this.

[23:13] This is always going to be stuck at level 2.5, which is highway change. The stuff that BMW has had for the past five or six years it's never going to self-drive.

[23:25] So I feel like, you know, if you're spending $65,000 on this... Well, in this case, $75,000. Yeah, closer to $70,000 on this when you spec it out. I just don't see it competing. It certainly doesn't do it for me in a luxury car. So taking a step back, let's talk about the core chassis and the steering.

[23:40] You feel road vibration, but not road feel, and it's very, very light. And weirdly, not VGRS, but, like, it's not super quick like some of the other BMWs are, like some big modern M cars, a very, very fast steering.

[23:54] Yeah. Chassis-wide struts on multiple gears, you talked about. Passive dampers only. The YL that we just drove has adaptive dampers. Right. And the R2 launch edition has adaptive dampers.

[24:06] And both of them ride better than the Stardust. Yeah. Okay, so let's clarify that. They ride better when you're doing this. Yeah. This clearly, dynamically... Really, it's tire-limited. It's tire-limited. It does have better dynamics.

[24:18] Bunch of rear balance is better. you can whip this thing around much better than you can the YL. The YL is more of like that luxury car boat experience. It does not turn it understeers quite a bit more by design. But again, like, BMW is a luxury car brand, right?

[24:32] That's what this is supposed to be in this electric car space. I don't think, I think it's totally skewed in a direction. I'd rather give it up max flat G in a car that's designed as a pod for like an objective maneuvering,

[24:47] handling test, I would give up metrics there for this car to be quieter and even more isolated because from an input side, it's not particularly engaging. So I don't really care about its max handling limits

[25:00] versus like a YL. Right, 100%. And I can't get over the fact that you can hear this car being excited by that vibration. You hear it in kind of the front, you feel it in the back, you feel the whole car just at this tremor

[25:13] constantly. I think it's important to point out from a viewer's side of things that you and I are diametrically opposed in what we personally own. I'm Mr. V8, and you have a BMW iX, which you absolutely adore

[25:25] because it is a pod. It's quiet, it has an interesting interior, it has a great audio system, and it's ultra-refined. And that's what I was hoping this car would be more.

[25:37] Like, the speed part is irrelevant. Yeah, of course. To be honest, I know this is not the same, but we just spent time talking to the Ferrari folks on the Luce. I talked to them about how do you make an EV feel like a luxury product and feel interesting in this spot,

[25:51] regardless of how you see about the Luce styling and interior. What they talk about is acceleration, horsepower, and even max handling G numbers are irrelevant to making an EV feel special.

[26:03] What makes an EV feel special or different in this class is how it feels to drive not what it necessarily does And I think that concept applied to this is why I don like this car I very largely ambivalent about it It at over because I spending more money than

[26:23] what the other EVs are doing. It needs to feel uniquely BMW and it doesn't. For me, I just don't want to shit all over the start because I know that this is like the starting point and clearly this is going to scale out to the low end to the high end and we're

[26:41] looking at essentially the low end here my problem is this should be a showcase of all the engineering and technology that is put into it and when I'm confused that all of that on that back end you just can't believe the money that they spent and what they did in terms of electronic architecture

[26:58] ECU's, body structure, electric motors, batteries, I mean you could go on and on and on and when you get in here and I get the overall sensation that I'm in a very low end car.

[27:12] There's nothing that particularly stands out about this as being a BMW. Let's remove the hybrid HUD and the screen and just remove all of that for a second and just focus on what this car is like to drive and it feels more like an entry level like

[27:27] low tier luxury car or even a commodity car in many cases has better core ride quality attributes things that don't constantly intrude with the buzziness in the front the constant like excitement

[27:43] in the vibration in the body through the steering and all of that it just doesn't feel like all of that work translates into a great driving experience and I certainly can't tell it apart if I do this from pretty much every single other car.

[27:57] There's something that's lost here in terms of identity that's hard for me to process, and I looked at the controls, right? They improve controls on the throttle, the actual throttle engagement, brake pedal feel, regen feel, all of that.

[28:10] I just feel like most people are never going to be able to tell that that's even a big issue here, and I mean, it is smoother, but it's not like, oh my gosh, I have to buy this car because guess what? the throttle pedal calibration is better than a Toyota.

[28:24] Like, you know, it's not even a nuance that transforms the driving experience, namely when you compare it to the other EVs in this segment that do it just as good, if not better. So when this is not great, the pedals are just as good

[28:37] as what everybody else is doing, what does it leave you with? And what I want from a BMW or a luxury brand is to isolate out those things that should be isolated out in a luxury car experience, and this just doesn't do anything any different.

[28:51] and in some cases it's worse for me. I think, you know, the counterpoint that PR, which, to be fair, this car was not given to us by PR, will say is that, you know, look at the interior and the exterior.

[29:03] What I'm going to say in response to that, and technology, is that if a modern BMW from an EV side is literally just boiled down to the hybrid HUD and the giant display,

[29:15] then as a brand that's deeply concerning, because what makes a BMW a BMW, particularly in their well-engineered, experienced cars, is the experience of driving them. If you get into a modern G-Series M car, again, I'm comparing an EV to an ICE,

[29:30] you drive an M2, M3, M4, CS, ESL, they all feel distinctly M car. For better and for worse, they have a unique character and their segment to the way they drive.

[29:43] That's more than just their interior and their exterior styling. That's my problem with this car, is that it doesn't feel unique, to my point that I made earlier about the Ferrari, it doesn't feel unique to them, right?

[29:57] And if it's just dreams and tech, it's very concerning for a brand that usually in the past was engineering first, right? My argument about old M versus M today is, you know,

[30:09] sure, they were always cars for yuppies, but they were cars that the engineering sold the yuppies on buying said car. Now it's a layer of marketing and weirdness. And tech first.

[30:21] And tech first. And service level tech, not the core things that make these cars really special. It's what you talked about in the show. DC architecture, the motor architecture, battery architecture.

[30:33] I just wish all of that translated. Into something more special in terms of the driving experience. And that's just the end of the story here for me. I know the argument is going to be, well, what do you expect for an extra-level product? It's not extra-level.

[30:45] It's over-expected. Exactly. The expectation level has gone up, again, because we constantly talk about some of the commodity cars have caught up to this point, and even the other cars in this segment that they're trying to compete with do much better.

[30:59] I know, I do. They're better. They feel better on the road all the time. Or more special. Exactly. They have an identity and character. This is just, to me, like a copy and paste job of what was the Chinese market doing?

[31:14] What are the tech brands doing? How do we do the same thing but give it this unique spin and make it much bigger than what it really is? And like I said, when you turn this stuff off, what is it like when you close your eyes to that?

[31:27] And it's just, it's very average. And I think that's the most disappointing part for me personally getting behind the wheel of this. I expected a lot more, namely coming out of the iX, the previous generation iX, which I know is a more expensive car overall, but last generation, way last generation technology.

[31:45] They had a lot more going on there in terms of refinement than this car that should have bled more into this would have been a better starting point. It deeply concerns me for what the next X5 is going to be like. My family owns an X5.

[31:57] My mother weirdly would like to buy another X5, despite the way the current one looks. and you know you could say what you want about prior generation BMW but that X5 despite so much reliability problems was such a compelling car in its space yeah I'm kind of maybe worried maybe I

[32:16] shouldn't be about what that vehicle is going to be like today final thoughts on the BMW iX3 here's the takeaway Jack drove this while he was filming interior and exterior and he brought the

[32:28] car back and he's like, I could care less about this thing. And I thought that was a bold statement. Now, I'm a little bit different. I'm the easy guy. I have an iX that I own, or at least, and then I have a long-term gravity, but I also have internal combustion cars.

[32:42] So I look at this and my expectation was like way up here because I know how much money they spent on this, how long the development cycle was. Everything's new on here from the battery pack, the electrical architecture, the ECUs, the control structure of this car. It should be

[32:58] amazing and I understand this is like their entry-level product but they're also a luxury brand. They don't do commodity cars and the fact that I can cover up the BMW badge in here and confuse it maybe for some knockoff Chinese EV because of the tax implementation is so cheesy and the fact

[33:13] that the commodity cars have gotten so good on their interiors. Look at the Ioniq 5. Look at some of the other electric cars in the space like the Tesla Model Y I just drove. Try to tell a Tesla owner to come in here and take

[33:25] this. There's no reason why you would buy this over a Tesla in terms of technology. A car that can drive itself with flushed out software versus something that's just kind of like confused at what it's trying to be. And on top of that the

[33:38] quality of the interior space and overall is not much better than the cars that are in the $40,000 price category. And that's a big problem when you're a luxury brand, at least in the United States. I feel like we're moving away

[33:50] from this era of tack is luxury and the fact that this car as we know with many BMWs they taint in value they don't hold their value so why would you want to spend more money on this when you can get more out of a commodity car where

[34:04] you're going to walk away from it and at least have some value left that's my struggle with it while it does have great efficiency you can tell they made improvements there it doesn't have the ride quality of something like the model YL. It has a choppy ride. That high frequency, high or low amplitude impact, there's just constant

[34:22] jitteriness in the steering wheel and the body. The inputs aren't any better than what the competitors are doing right now. So I feel like this is launching as their first electric car of this generation, and it doesn't hit home in any special way where I feel like you have to buy this.

[34:36] Now, there are some great things about it, and I think when it gets to the iX5 and some of these higher-end models, they're going to be way better than this. But truthfully, I feel like this needs way more work to be compelling for the price tag that they're trying to command. But I'm going to leave it at that. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next video.