BMW Just Made My Old X5 Worth More (Accidentally)

[00:01] a very specific kind of relief that only comes from dodging a bullet that you didn't even know was being fired at you. That's what I felt the second the new X5 dropped. Not disappointment, not anger, relief. The kind of relief that you feel

[00:14] when you checked your bank account after a wild weekend and it's somehow fine. I bought a G05 40i M Sport back in 2022 and for 3 years, I have occasionally wondered if I got it too early, if some future version was coming to make mine

[00:28] look like a flip phone next to an iPhone. Then, BMW answered that question for me permanently. With a face that looks like a beaver that lost a bar this reveal rooting for him. I mean, the G05 is not the perfect vehicle. Nothing

[00:43] is, but it is a confident car, a car that knows what it's supposed to look like and doesn't apologize for it. So, I sat down at the unveiling ready to be a little bit jealous, ready to feel that familiar pain of man, I wish I'd waited.

[00:57] equivalent of watching someone almost get on a flight that later gets canceled. There's a strange comfort in watching a brand that you love make a decision so confusing that it retroactively validates everything you

[01:10] already own. I didn't have to wait for the reviews, I didn't have to wait for the test drives, I just had to look at one photo and the math did itself. This is a story of a company that takes a design so beloved it basically prints

[01:22] money and deciding the real move was to staple a Twitter logo to its forehead. Like, subscribe so we can hit two mil by the end of the year and let's go. Hey guys, real quick, the giveaway for the Shelby and Supra and the $100,000 has

[01:35] ended and well, the winners are being picked right now. But, we're coming back the link in the pinned first comment because like Rocky who won the GT-R, like Greg who won the 100K, you can sign up to be notified and get 100 free

[01:49] entries once it goes live. So, click the link down below, go put in your email have cooking. All right, back to the show. Yes, today we are going through every single decision BMW made on its new X5 that nobody asked for, ranking

[02:04] an entire owner's community looks at this thing in unison and reach for their wallets to buy the old one before it disappears. By the end of this, you'll totally understand why I'm going to go hug the wheel of my G05 because

[02:18] well, I'm weird and I just love it and [music] it just survived war. Okay, let's all start with the headlights because BMW certainly did. Somebody in Munich looked at a perfectly good circular daytime running light, a shape

[02:32] that has worked since the dawn of the automobile and said, "What if we made it automobile and said, "What if we made it an X? Not a stylized X, an actual letter the car just lost a round of Looney Tunes. I mean, in cartoons when the

[02:45] character takes a frying pan to the face, you know they're done because the eyes turn into X's. BMW built that into the front fascia on purpose. This isn't a headlight, it's a death certificate charging port. And yeah, apparently you

[03:00] singular bar, which is an [music] engineering equivalent of admitting the joke wasn't funny and trying to take it back mid-laughs. So, if you want to find the used market in a few years or honestly, if you want to track down a

[03:13] clean G05 like mine before the good ones disappear, there's an Auto Tempest link searches every site at once so you're not refreshing five tabs at 1:00 a.m. like a maniac. Next up, the grill. Now, the G80 grill, that was bad. For

[03:27] generations though, the kidney grill [music] had presence on the X5. It said something. It was the one part of a BMW that you could spot from three cars back in a parking lot. Now, it's been pinched down into two narrow slits stacked over

[03:41] a set of buck teeth and the whole front end reads less like a luxury SUV and see. Yeah, people keep calling it the beaver looking. Honestly, the beaver comparison. I mean, a beaver at least

[03:54] teeth. This thing just sits in your driveway looking startled. And the part that really stings is that the old grill wasn't broken. It had grown over the years, sure. Some generations lean bigger than others, but it always had

[04:08] weight to it. A sense that the front of the car was doing something. This new shape looks like it got nervous in front of a crowd and shrank. Then there is the split gate, and this one actually hurts my little heart. The two-piece tailgate

[04:22] wasn't a gimmick. It was the single most useful piece of the design on the entire vehicle. You drop the bottom half, you sit on it, you tie your shoes, you load groceries without swinging a giant door into a guy parked next to you. It's just

[04:34] gone. Gone. Replaced with one big slab, because apparently a feature people loved for two decades was something that was holding back progress. Somewhere there's a product manager who put remove

[04:47] innovation, and somewhere there's a focus group that BMW is pretending agreed with them. And that is not great, brother. Now, the They've gone with these flush winglet style handles that look sleek in a press

[05:02] time you're standing there with grocery bags in both hands trying to figure out which part of the door actually pops open. Cars with flush handles have a long, proud history of freezing shut in the winter, and BMW just signed up the

[05:16] X5 for that club voluntarily. The interior bullet didn't escape, either. They bolted on a second screen for the passenger like it's a kiosk at a DMV. Ditch the physical climate controls in favor for touch panels you have to stab

[05:29] at while driving, and gave us a steering wheel so sculpted and over wrought it something. Buttons used to mean that you could operate your car without taking your eyes off of the road. Now, you're navigating a tablet at 70 mph hoping you

[05:44] hit seat heat and not eject. And the dashboard itself has been stretched into the windshield [music] wide display strip, which sounds futuristic until you travel further to find the actual speed than they did when you were looking at

[05:58] an analog dial back in 1995. [music] And on top of that, how much is that windshield even going to cost to replace? I don't want any rock chips. I don't want to find out. And somebody in a boardroom, somebody decided the move

[06:11] that ties it all together is hands-free highway driving where the car changes lanes because you looked at the mirror, which sounds futuristic until you [music] of what your eyes already do except now a computer is grading you on

[06:25] it. Here's the thing that absolutely gets me. None of these are small misses. This is what happens when a design team optimizes for a market on the other side of the planet and forgets the customer who built the badge's reputation in the

[06:38] first place. The narrow grill, the illuminated logo, the gimmick lighting, all of it tracks a trend line that has nothing to do with the driver in Ohio who just wants buttons that work in a tailgate that splits. You can totally

[06:50] committee and you can especially feel it when that committee is chasing a sales chart instead of a driving experience, which goes totally against the slogan for BMW. Now, I got to give credit where credit is due. I mean, the battery

[07:04] numbers on the iX5 are legitimately impressive. North of 500 mi of range current EV crop look like they're plugged into a potato. But, I mean, honestly, the iX5 kind of just looks like the iX3 if you're asking me. Now,

[07:19] if BMW had put that powertrain into the current body, the one that I have right now, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. The engineering [music] team clearly did their job. Somebody just let the design team anywhere near

[07:32] the final product and somebody else apparently told them no notes. Now, lesson buried under all the buck teeth and the dead pixel headlights, and it's this. The things people love about a product are rarely the loud features.

[07:48] Nobody bought an X5 because of a panoramic screen, they bought it because of the tailgate, which did something clever. Because the grill looked like it'd been carved instead of printed. Because the whole thing felt like it

[08:00] chase a new market hard enough to abandon the customer who's already loyal to you, you don't gain a new fan base, you just confuse the one you had. My G05, well, it's not going anywhere. It's actually probably going up in value

[08:15] right now. Not because I'm stubborn, but because BMW just spent a global reveal explaining in incredible detail exactly what they think that they can get away what they think that they can get away with removing. A few year old BMW X5 40i

[08:28] M Sport is sitting around 47 to $50,000 right now against 61,000 or so original sticker. And as of this week, [music] yes, that depreciation curve just became the best argument for buying one I could ever make for you. Sometimes the

[08:42] smartest car purchase isn't the new one. Sometimes it's just refusing to let go of the old one while everybody else figures out what they actually wanted. the new one hits driveways and gets its first round of owners complaints, the

[08:56] same way every redesign does. And I'll probably feel the same way I felt right now, which is grateful, genuinely grateful that I made the decision before the buck teeth showed up. There's a version of car ownership where you're

[09:10] wondering if you're one model year behind. Then there's this, sitting there, watching the chase happen to somebody else. So, let me know your thoughts. Did BMW kill it, or did they absolutely kill the X5? Let me know in

[09:24] the comments down below. Who's driving a G05? Well, I want to know. The B58, the best motor ever made? Yes, I think so. So, I want to see you guys in the hit 2 million subs by the end of this year. Check out some of these ideal

[09:38] vids. I'm Brad Danger. This is Ideal and promise me one thing, keep living the promise me one thing, keep living the ideal lifestyle.