Tesla Model Y vs BMW iX3: from Lowestoft to Land’s End... on one charge?

And today, Ollie Kew and I are out to take our place in that pantheon of brave pioneers. Our death or glory mission? To make it from England’s most easterly mainland point to its most westerly, on a single charge. Lowestoft Ness to Land’s End, 425-odd miles, no top ups. Southern England is our sound barrier, the BMW iX3 and Tesla Model Y our experimental rocket planes.

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood

Under a bracingly bleak Suffolk dawn, our gleaming machines brimmed to the gunnels with electrons, we steel ourselves for adventure, point west and – “Well obviously I’m not going to make it", Ollie pipes up over the radio. He’s in the Tesla, and he may have a point. Our long range Model Y has a 75kWh battery (probably, Tesla won’t actually reveal the exact numbers because Tesla) for an official 391 miles of range. The longest of long shots, then. Call it the yardstick, the benchmark for BMW to surpass.

Because the iX3, in theory, might make it. Packing a 108kWh battery, it boasts an official 500 miles of range on the endearingly fictional WLTP cycle. If I drive like the accelerator’s on actual fire, there’s a strong chance it’ll reach Land’s End. But we’re not going to drive like that. No hypermiling, no lorry drafting, just calm, sensible real world driving. Easy on the throttle, easy on the aircon. We’re going to drive, in short, like my dad. Behind the wheel of the BMW, I’m feeling far from confident.

As grey gives way to slightly less grey, we skim through East Anglian villages that sound like small time law firms (Beccles, Bungay and Botesdale: handling your family’s conveyancing needs since 1922). I would love to regale you with tales of the exotic sights we see, the unusual characters we meet along the way, but I cannot. We drive steadily and relentlessly, stopping only to replenish photographer Fleetwood’s snack pockets. While this fails to provide much material for the memoirs, it does at least give plenty of time to appreciate our cars’ long distance comfort.

The iX3’s cabin is a lovely place to spend a long time. The seats are deeply comfortable, the ADAS stuff unintrusive and subtle, the screen setup far more logical and navigable than BMWs of old. OK, its steering wheel is an utter eyesore, and also very difficult to tell whether it’s pointing the right way up or at 180° of lock. OK, the awkward angles of that central screen will, I suspect, only look more awkward with age. But the pillar to pillar ‘Panoramic Vision’ display at the base of the windscreen works an absolute treat, and entirely negates the need for a head-up display. Our iX3 also has a head-up display. I cannot explain why.

As we hit the M25, I hop into the Tesla, and the morning loses a little of its colour. Try as I might, I can’t get on board with the Model Y’s cabin. Some might see elegant minimalism. I see a whole lot of nothing for this car’s £58k asking price. Tesla may claim its stick everything on the screen approach sits easy with the smartphone generation, but when you’re figuring out how to turn off, say, airplane mode on your smartphone, there’s rarely the risk of rear ending a Morrisons truck at 70mph. Even the gear selector lives on the touchscreen. Just, no.

The Model Y’s lack of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay would be the real dealbreaker for me. Tesla says its proprietary software does the job fine. This is not true. As we pass Stonehenge – proudly confusing passersby since 3100BC! – the BMW’s battery is down to 50 per cent, while the Tesla’s is touching 40. Over 200 miles still to run. I subtly engineer a switch back into the iX3.

The BMW feels a weightier prospect than the Tesla. The following day, I take both cars for a range crushing blast along Cornwall’s north coast road. The iX3 proves a more satisfying drive, with greater heft and linearity to its controls. BMW hasn’t aimed for outright sportiness here – the next-gen M3, based on the same Neue Klasse architecture, will be along soon to cover that shift – but you can still tell the iX3 is the work of engineers with decades of experience setting up Ultimate Driving Machines.

‘Heart of Joy’ may sound like something bought from a Goop catalogue and subsequently extracted by several medical professionals, but turns out integrating all your dynamic tech into a single ‘superbrain’ delivers a driving experience unusually coherent by EV standards.

But the Tesla, while far more synthetic to pilot quickly – the steering boasts all the enthusiastic feedback of a landlord asked to fix a faulty boiler – unquestionably feels lighter on the road, making fewer demands of its suspension. The Tesla officially stands around 300kg lighter than the BMW. It feels like more.

Lack of mass will only get you so far. As we hit Devon, the Tesla’s battery dips below 25 per cent, with the BMW’s at a luxurious 40. So yes, turns out the car with less range struggles to go as far on a charge. Shocking scenes. But (at the risk of undermining this entire journey) how much does ultimate range really matter? Once you’re past, say, a 300-mile buffer, arguably charge speed becomes more important, and both these cars can ingest electrons at an unseemly rate: the previous day, I saw the iX3 pull 280kW from a 300kW post.

OK, it didn’t sustain that rate for long, but 10 minutes to add enough juice to get from London to Liverpool will, I suspect, be sufficient for most. The Model Y can’t quite hit the same peaks, but Tesla’s supercharger network remains the benchmark for convenience.

The Model Y taps out on the Cornwall-Devon border, with 82 miles to Land’s End and six per cent battery remaining. We abandon Ollie to locate a charge point and curse the slow speed of coastal erosion – trim 20-odd miles off either end of England, maybe he could have made it – and push on west. Sorry, Ollie. It’s not the end of the world.

The iX3, though, soldiers on. Beyond Bodmin, beyond Truro, beyond Hayle, onto Britain’s very toenail. Even with just a handful of miles to run and the iX3’s range readout cheerily predicting we’ve got it in the bag, I cannot unclench. Fast chargers in Cornwall’s western extremity are... well, non-existent. Run out here, you’re in for a wait of many hours and the high likelihood of being eaten by a cow.

Needn’t have worried. The iX3 rolls into Land’s End with a luxurious six per cent charge remaining. We’ve made it: the full width of England on a single charge. The equivalent of over 200 laps of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, with a similar amount of overtaking. It’s a shellacking, a thrashing, a rout. England’s extremities, you took one hell of a beating.

Kew, rejoining us after a supercharger splash and dash, hands over the coveted Top Gear EV Range Champion trophy. The Model Y has been defeated. But then... has it? Yes, the Tesla managed 80-odd miles fewer than the iX3 on a charge, but on a 30 per cent smaller battery. The Model Y averaged 4.85 miles per kWh on our cross-England schlep, the iX3 4.18. So, for all BMW’s claimed blank sheet efficiency gains with its Neue Klasse, the Model Y remains the more efficient electron sipper. Smaller tank, bigger mpg.

In a rare moment of EV charge point convenience, there’s a 50kW Osprey post in the Land’s End car park. We plug in the iX3. It doesn’t work, but takes £135 from my card for the privilege of revealing this. So here we are with EVs in 2026: when it comes to the cars, you have to search hard to find the inconvenience. When it comes to the infrastructure, you really don’t. In Britain’s less populated corners, public charging is still too sparse, too slow, too glitchy, and too expensive when it actually works.

At least, as EVs become longer and longer range, we’re becoming less dependent on our janky charging network to bail us out. Because if this test has proved anything (beyond ‘bigger battery go more far’) it’s that range anxiety is close to becoming a niche concern. At least, that is, if you’ve got the cash for a shiny new long range EV.

Which of these shiny new long range EVs would I choose for my England-crossing needs? Hardly a contest. The BMW is only a mite more expensive than the Model Y, but just a nicer car all round. Rides better, comfier cabin, less baffling screenery, actual buttons for its wing mirrors. It feels, in terms of tech and sophistication, a generation beyond the Model Y.

Maybe Tesla has itself to blame here. Spend a decade showing the world what an EV should be, and eventually someone’s going to spend 10 billion euros to knock you off your perch. From where I’m standing, on the windswept edge of Britain next to a grubby EV that may not have enough charge to get back to civilisation, BMW’s big investment has paid off. The iX3 is a bona fide range champ. We ran out of England before it ran out of charge.

BMW iX3 xDrive M Sport

Price: £60,250 (£65,562.50 as tested)
Powertrain: Dual motor, 463bhp, 476lb ft
Transmission: 1spd auto, AWD
Battery/range: 108.9kWh / 497 miles
Performance: 0–62mph in 4.9 seconds, 130mph
Weight: 2,360kg

Tesla Model Y Long Range AWD 

Price: £51,990 (£57,990 as tested)
Powertrain: Dual motor, 400bhp (est), 390lb ft (est)
Transmission: 1spd auto, AWD
Battery/range: 75kWh (est) / 391 miles
Performance: 0–62mph in 4.6 seconds, 125mph
Weight: 1,997kg