"Drives like a BMW ought to": why the iX3 is Top Gear's 2026 Car of the Year

Now we have the first of another Neue Klasse. This iX3 is wholly new. Above and beneath. Bumper to bumper. Ground to cloud.

Photography: John Wycherley

From now on pretty well all of the electric BMWs, Minis and Rolls-Royces will use this technology. Even the cars with engines will take a lot from the Neue Klasse: the styling themes (even if they don’t have the long wheelbase proportions) and the new dash interface and a lot of the driver support. That’s 40-odd cars in the next two years.

The iX3, and indeed the concept car for the related i3 saloon, get off on the right foot. After years of mucking about, BMW’s stylists have now got it right. The iX3 speaks of distinction and modernity, but doesn’t set out to scare anyone. The clean, solid surfaces intersect with neatly defined creases. It’s different from everyone else’s crossover and it doesn’t need odd proportions or fussy lines to do it. There’s a new face mask, but this isn’t Halloween.

The furniture inside is beautifully tranquil. And the new interface won’t wind you up. The screens are easy to arrange the way you want, and you can control a lot from the wheel buttons as well as by touch. The main innovation is a second set of widgets – again, chosen by you – on a ‘panorama’ display reflected up into the base of the windscreen. Panoramic iDrive they call it and it works a treat.

But BMW never set out its stall as the Ultimate Styling Machine or the Ultimate Interiors Machine. They’re nice-to-haves – and in this case they are very nice to have – but we’re here for the Ultimate Driving Machine. Those three words incidentally were composed by Martin Puris, one of the great American ad men, as BMW’s tagline for the anglophone world. In other languages BMW continued to use translations of a slogan from its pre-war days Freude am Fahren. You can read that as Joy of Driving, but the English agency moulded it into Sheer Driving Pleasure. Over in Germany though, they still talk of it as joy, and that’s why the dynamics of the Neue Klasse cars are controlled by something they like to be known as the Heart of Joy. We’ll come to that in a bit.

First, have they succeeded? Oh yes. The iX3 drives like a BMW ought to. Not like a bulky EV crossover, or soulless digital first zombiemobile. Cornering and ride match some particularly well set-up AWD 3 Series. But the powertrain is vastly smoother and more responsive.

The iX3 is relaxed when the going’s easy. It holds true to a straight line and peels into curves with an intuitive weight and gearing to the steering, brakes and accelerator pedal. The suspension and steering feel frictionless.

Get a wiggle on and it remains remarkably content. Electric crossovers tend to throw their weight around, but this one staves off roll, heave and pitch. It doesn’t understeer if you have to tighten your radius. It’s decorous during simultaneous inputs of brake, steering or accelerator, even when the road also bowls you a googly with a dip or crest. It’s organic and engaged: you can feel the power going to the rear, and the steering lightening when the front tyres can do no more. Even in the wet.

In short, it feels light, in a way EV crossovers don’t. I actually tested it as a very finished but still disguised prototype; it feels well under two tonnes even though I guessed in reality it would be two and a quarter. Sure enough, the official figure is 2,285kg plus driver.

Key to this is our new friend the Heart of Joy. A single central processor replaces the conventional dozen or so chassis and drive processors that don’t always communicate fast enough or even agree with each other. At brain-melting speed The Heart of Joy bosses the motors and regenerative braking, and also the steering assistance and stability systems. E-motors need faster control than engines because they react faster, and the Heart of Joy has scope to control upcoming chassis additions: adaptive suspension, anti-roll and the four separate per-wheel motors of future M cars. It wraps the whole lot into one seamless control strategy.

So if you’re losing grip, the HoJ can magic up the correct torque from each motor and adapt the steering weight and even brake a wheel. Because it can do it instantly and even predictively, what you feel is progressive and intuitive. Of course the iX3’s chassis isn’t just about digital control. It’s an all-new mechanical design too, even if it’s basically an evolution of familiar BMW themes.

The iX3 uses regeneration, not friction, for about 95 per cent of braking events. Great for efficiency of course. But also it gives the pedal an impressively consistent feel because it’s not juggling two different retarding forces. Also, the thing comes to rest with an uncanny absence of jerks or creaks – you really can’t point to the exact moment it has come to rest. Joy of stopping.

The going, under the same Joy-ous control as the chassis, is beautifully regulated too. The first iX3 on sale is this 50 xDrive, 469bhp between the two motors. That gets the 0–62 performance down into the fours. The pedal is properly authoritative but never nervous.

So you’ve easily the power to enjoy the drive. But if the drive is long, you need power in the other direction, for quick recharging. Well I stood alongside the iX3 as it went from 10 to 50 per cent, which represents 200 miles of WLTP range, in 10 minutes flat, holding 400kW for much of that time. On the 20in aero wheels, it’s rated at exactly 500 miles WLTP range, which would be 350 real motorway miles. That sort of range stems from efficiency as well as sheer battery size – it’s a not outlandish 109kWh, with an 800V system.

Efficiency too helps unlock journey times – better on a 500 mile trip not to stop at all than to stop even for a brief charge. I got 3.5 miles per kWh on a mixed drive which is awesome for something this big and fast. Thank the fact the Neue Klasse has all new cells, new silicon carbide inverters, new thermal management and new motors. The main rear one is an all coil EESM, a new design but the same principle as BMW and Renault have used for years. The front one is a simple induction motor (AKA asynchronous, like in an early Tesla) because it’s compact and doesn’t drag when not powered up. So neither use rare earth elements. All that electrical system gets another integrated superbrain.

Having insisted in 2018 it would be making self driving cars by now, BMW has finally got real. The iX3 isn’t self driving and doesn’t pretend to be, but its driver assists, safety supports and self parking tricks are easy to get along with, smooth acting and feel like they’re cooperating with you rather than having a better idea all the time. So you’re unlikely to smash the screen in a wild eyed attempt to quench them. Besides, most of those buttons are, sensibly, on the steering wheel.

It’s a rather pointed irony that BMW is using SpaceX levels of technology to overhaul Tesla’s cars, which are advancing only slowly. But the iX3 can’t be priced like a moonshot. It has to sell in numbers, as it’s so pivotal to BMW’s future, and midsize crossovers are absolutely where it’s at for the premium manufacturers. This 500 mile 4WD new iX3 launches at £58,775 – notably less than the original iX3, with 2WD and little over half the range cost at launch five years ago.

Dr Mike Reichelt, head of the Neue Klasse project, visibly puffed out his chest when reminding me that building a totally new car at BMW is “a once in every other decade opportunity”. His new iX3 is mission critical to BMW in a way nothing else has been for, well, 63 years. And what matters to BMW matters to the rest of us because its cars have always been at the tip of mainstream excellence. Just as well the iX3 absolutely, as the kids say, smashes it, and snaffles the biggest prize of them all.