BMW iX3 50 xDrive M Sport - long-term review

I’m aware that, despite it being our reigning Car of the Year, the iX3’s had a bit of tough time on TG’s fleet so far. So let’s keep that going, as there are some other faults to discuss…

The head-up display – part of the £1,700 Technology Plus Pack, which also includes the (good) three-zone air-con and (good) Harman/Kardon audio system – has been off since day one. Well, almost off since day one, as occasionally the HUD decides it’s needed and comes back on when I start the iX3. But I turn it off again, for three reasons: first, the HUD graphics feature a horizontal line, and because the secondary ride is a little busy, all I see is a strip of blue light bouncing at high frequency right in my eyeline. Second, the graphics appear rather low-res and/or out of focus, so just looking at them makes my eyes hurt.

Third – and praise where it’s due – the panoramic strip of screens reflected up from the top of the dashboard into the base of the windscreen are bloody brilliant. So even if the HUD was any good, all the info you need is sitting right below it anyway.

My other major gripe is with the steering wheel, or at least the controls on it – and given the iX3 was the first car from the ground-up, clean-sheet, all-new Neue Klasse family, I don’t know how they’ve messed this bit up so badly.

If you’re holding any steering wheel at quarter-past-nine or ten-to-two, you should be able to rotate your thumbs 90-degrees down and touch every button. But in the iX3 you can’t. Now I’ve got big hands, big enough to palm a basketball, and yet I cannot reach the part of the controls (and it’s a pad, not an individual button) that lowers the volume without some awkward upward-and-across reach. And if you place your hands further up the wheel to ease that, you can’t press the controls to skip tracks.

Speaking of which, because all the controls are on one pad, and because BMW has placed the area of the pad that controls calls and the area of the pad that skips forward a track (or 15 seconds on a podcast) right next to each other, too often I go to skip through a minute-long ad with four presses, and suddenly I’ve brought up the telephone menu, dialled a number, cancelled a number and re-dialled it all in a couple of seconds.

It’s because all the controls are mounted up against the central boss, not out on the spoke. If they just moved it an inch to the right, to fill that random styling gap, all might be well, but no, someone in the design department overruled sense and put a few oft-used controls just… out… of… reach. Oh, and just to irk you more, next to nothing ever happens on the left-hand touchpad, so that’s more or less a blank for 99 per cent of the time.

Other niggles, that at least haven’t seemed to reoccur, was the initial Android Auto takeover that wasn’t sure whether it wanted to leave a strip of BMW shortcut controls at the bottom of the touchscreen, or 100 per cent fill the screen and have them pop-up when your fingers got close. And the random 48 hours where the iX3 connected to my phone, would stream music and the like, but then wouldn’t play phone calls through the car’s speakers.

Still, we’re off to Cornwall to end the summer, and because of the 400-mile real-world range, I’ve not even bothered to look at charging points, which is a plus.