BMW iX3 50 xDrive M Sport - long-term review

The iX3 makes a terrible first impression. 

Take driving it. If you lift off the throttle at any point near a corner, in a corner or on a roundabout, the iX3 immediately applies the brakes. I might be having a slight lift, or maybe I am about to brake, but the BMW decides it is definitely braking. And it does so immediately, so as to give you no chance to move your own right foot to the adjacent pedal, and it does it clumsily, like you’re a 17-year-old learner.

It also likes braking for you when you indicate off a main road, or as you approach a junction to join a main road. Only it won’t slow you down enough to make the turn. And while it will come to a stop behind another car in traffic, if you’re coming up to a T-junction and there’s nothing in front, it won’t stop, meaning you carry on out into any oncoming traffic…

Turn it off you say? There are two shortcut keys on the right-hand side of the infotainment screen (both are hidden by my own hand when holding the wheel, given it’s angled towards the driver) but one turns off the speed limit warning – which is so unobtrusive I don’t ever bother – and the other controls the lane keeping assist – which suffers none of the jitters most VW Group systems do on country roads, so again I leave it be.

It’s got nothing to do with the plethora of mandated ADAS warnings either. You can ditch the acoustic noise for speed limits, the lane-keeping assist, the attentiveness assistant, and a bunch of other steering and braking interventions, but that elicits no change.

Instead, it’s the ‘Route and junction assistant’ that you want – and then control of your own car is (mostly) restored. It’s a terrible default setting that made my family think I’d lost the ability to drive, but at least once it’s off, it stays off and doesn’t need toggling for each journey.

Alas that know-it-all approach is present elsewhere in the iX3 too. Such as when I get out of the car and walk round to open the door for my daughter. At this point the iX3 decides I’m off and locks itself, the retractable door handles nipping your fingertips just as you reach out.

Or there’s when I walk back past the car, push open the charging flap and retrieve the cable for our home charger – at which point I always turn to find the door handles retracting and the electric charging cover closing. Why iX3, if I’ve just opened the charging flap and am just a few metres away, have you decided I’m done with you?

For all it’s supposed new-generation Neue Klasse smarts, sometimes the iX3’s pretty dumb.