The BMW X1 compromises ride comfort for a sportier drive, quite unlike the cars that built the brand’s reputation
Are mainstream BMWs getting sportier, or am I just getting older? I pondered this a little warily the other day, as a road tester accelerating into middle age a little like a hastily parked supermarket grocery delivery van with its handbrake left off.
It’s a thought that came to mind after I recently drove a fourth-generation BMW X3.
This car has had the kind of renovation you might expect from BMW at the moment, as the company shovels money at its Neue Klasse electric car platform while simultaneously trying to keep its combustion-engined models competitive.
Technically, it isn’t very new. The plug-in hybrid version gets a bit more electric range; the range-topping M Performance version gets a bit more power.
But the car’s dimensions have changed little. Mostly, it leans on fresh exterior styling, BMW’s latest networked infotainment tech and a new cabin design to lure buyers in.
But, to me at least, it seems altered in how it rides and handles. It’s markedly more firmly suspended than I remember the third-generation car being. I wouldn’t call it uncomfortable.
The mechanical refinement and isolation of the 20 xDrive M Sport 2.0-litre petrol example I drove was actually very good.
It was just firm: fussy, unyielding with roll control and seemingly short on wheel travel.
It needed no second invitation to skip off the top of a transverse ridge, to pitch and jounce busily down an uneven country road, or to toss you around in your seat by dropping its nearside wheels into a gulley and then fidgeting around its roll axis.
It had little sense of supple, compliant flow over even a gently undulating surface and – even with its optional adaptive dampers set to Comfort – it wasn’t ready to filter out many lumps and bumps.
The latest BMW iX2 gave me a similar impression when I drove one earlier this year – enough to make me question its suitability for family life in a way pretty damning of a modern SUV.
And the recurrence of the phenomenon made me wonder if, amid a lot more competition among mid-sized, premium-branded SUVs than there was, say, 10 years ago, BMW might now be risking some of the market-share progress that it has spent decades carefully conquering, in a bid to lift itself back above the melee.
Twenty years ago, when I was starting my career as a reviewer, the company was already well into its meteoric noughties rise to prominence.
You would still hear older hacks muttering long-held preconceptions that BMWs were just too firm for UK roads and middle-market tastes, though, as well as being all but unusable in slippery conditions, et cetera and ad nauseam.
I just didn’t recognise any justification for that view back then.
The test cars I was driving – and I remember the first ‘E46’ 3 Series I drove, and ‘E39’ 5 Series, very clearly – struck me as outstanding cars entirely compatible with UK roads, in the right model specification.
I think every Autocar review at the time advised “have SE or Sport, rather than M Sport, trim; have a more modest wheel size; and avoid run-flat tyres”. Nobody did, of course, but somehow it didn’t matter.
These were still the cars on which BMW built a world-leading reputation.
Fast forward 20 years, however, and the company now needs to do it all again, but with a catalogue full of higher-riding, big-selling SUVs to work with, and a growing proportion of electric motors in place of trademark straight-six engines.
Clearly, it won’t be easy. But I’d guard against trying to compensate for less ‘BMW-ness’ in some areas by turning up the sporting dynamism in others, and risking the happy compromise that has allowed the brand to suit so many.
Source: Autocar RSS Feed
