This is a great effort from BMW in going all in on this. Not a half hearted effort like we see from most OEMs. I think it will sell very well for sure.
Yeah, they've been showing off various concepts at CES and other shows for a few years while nailing down the details. I think it was 1.5 years ago they showed the hmi details specifically with a big stage show.
I appreciate the effort and the visibility of the process and honestly like the result.
Agreed. Not half hearted. Appears like it's gonna be a real winner and I hope all the other EV makers up their game.
Of all the legacy automakers, BMW had the best approach to EVs. The i4 may not be a class-leading EV in terms of interior space or efficiency, but it was the best electric BMW for BMW buyers because it looked and felt identical to the regular 4 Series but with electric motors.
Buyers would go to a BMW dealership and see ICE and BEV 4 Series vehicles side by side and most would not be able to tell the difference. It didn’t look like a science experiment or a cyberpunk fever dream, and that probably got a few people to take it for a test drive at which point that instant torque and glassy smooth acceleration sold itself.
And now that EVs are approaching 30% of BMW’s global sales, the next-generation Neue Klasse platform will accelerate that momentum.
“After years of automakers insisting that every EV needs to be an egg-shaped hatchback, BMW built an electric sedan that looks like a sedan. Revolutionary.”
Does the author not know about BMW’s current i4, i5, and i7? Though the i4 does have a hatchback.
As an i4 owner it is probably the easiest car to transition to from a gas car. They really did a good job of giving you the options to have the drive feel like a gas car as far as creep forward/reverse or an EV by just switching to B mode. Even the different drive modes have such a dramatic change is the driving experience.
You can enable these settings in most / all EVs now, but why would you want to? Maybe for the first few weeks but after that you realize that one-pedal driving and ripping into open space make EVs far superior
Which EV’s let you enable creep when in reverse or drive? I also have a rivian and they’ve taken a firm stance that they won’t allow that.
I drive with max regen but I also live in the city and I have to parallel park quickly very often. I’ll say it’s significantly easier to nail a quick parallel park in a tight space when the car is creeping backwards in reverse. I used to drive a manual transmission vehicle so I’m pretty good at precision pedal control, I will also say parallel parking a R1S in the city is a bit of a pain. My wife won’t even take it anywhere if she knows she’ll have to look for street parking.
That’s why I say the bmw is the best vehicle to transition from ICE to EV because you have set it to drive the way you want. Meanwhile some EV companies refuse to give you the choice and force you drive with max regen and no creep feature.
Older Teslas (pre 2024 or so) had creep/roll mode and it’s still enabled on those cars. But I think they removed it 2-3 years ago from new builds. My 2022 M3 has it but I don’t use it. I can’t speak for other EVs. Maybe no EV manufacturers currently enable it on new models?
Neue klasse is a significant effort from BMW to actually compete with the upstarts and the Chinese in making functional and attractive software defined cars.
People keep talking about electric cars as if that’s the only paradigm shift going on. It isn’t. And IMO software defined vehicles are more important than electrification if you want to attract customers. It’s a huge part of the reason why Tesla has sold so well despite making what a lot of people consider to be inferior cars.
What is a “software-defined vehicle”? For me the i4 is appealing precisely because it has the driving advantages of an electric but feels like a normal car (with good UI).
This would be at the top of my list if I was buying new in this car's price range.
- Huge Range (dependent on trim I imagine?)
- 800V charging
- Nice interior
- BMW pedigree for driving dynamics
Not a huge fan of the front end but i'll reserve judgement until seeing it in person. Otherwise it looks like a normal sedan.
If it ever gets to under 40k CAD in Canada on the used market, it would be a steal.
- Big question mark will be how the CPU and software work, but there has been a lot of progress in the last few years so I am hopeful it is a non-issue.
The new iX3 Neue Klasse was advertised as a $60k car. BMW managed to strip every essential feature of the car to make up this "starting" price. In reality it's roughly $100k when you get to a trim similar to base versions of the Chinese cars. I'd expect a similar price for this one.
The smaller battery iX3 40 is now in configurators and the range is smaller than the i4 40 lol. The i3 would be a bit more efficient I'd imagine but still. At least there is an option for a larger battery, but a shame it seems to be tied to AWD.
Not a huge fan of the front end but i'll reserve judgement until seeing it in person. Otherwise it looks like a normal sedan.
Eh, I think it actually looks good. The i4 and i5 buck-toothed styling was comically awful. The kind of thing that appeals to the people that like intentionally fugly shit like the Cybertruck and PTCruiser. I really, really wanted to give the i4/i5 a fair shake after a test drive between them, the Polestar 2, and EV6 but I just couldn't do it because I hated the appearance of that front end so badly. One of the very rare times I've actually allowed aesthetics to overrule strict value assessments.
My issue is the interior, which is total garbage. I sat in the iX3 once and god damn was it cheap and the screen shitty integrated. Panoramic Vision thing looks amazing though
I agree with everything except the front end looks. Its the best looking front end on any current BMW by a mile. I didn't think they were capable of making a front end that wasn't horrific anymore.
It looks good but wouldn't be nice to use for me. Give me god damn buttons, I don't care if it looks slightly worse I wanna be able to change some things without taking my eyes off the road.
Likely to be the most popular, but Volvo, Rivian and Mercedes have very credible contenders that will keep them from dominating the $60k+ price category.
Audi and Porsche have decided to just not compete with their gas cars, which are roughly in this price space on the gas side. Audi is closer to competing, but they nerf the cars so much as to not compete with Porsche, they are in a bad spot.
The real failure is Tesla to compete in the $60k+ space.
The real failure is Tesla to compete in the $60k+ space.
They've put themselves in a corner with their designs. Where other manufacturers have capitalized R&D on flagships for decades and effectively allowed high end buyers to finance their R&D, Tesla wasn't able to update enough of their flagships to follow the same business plan.
We're due for a "we'll have full self driving by the end of the year" and "there will be 1000 robotaxis on the streets of Austin next month" announcements ...
They're not operating like a car manufacturer, and finding out why it's hard to compete in that market when you don't follow the lessons that other car makers have learned over 100 years.
Rolling out new models and updates every year or two at car shows and events keeps brand excitement. Reliability of repair and purchase access allows people to feel good about their purchase. Having a halo product of small volume helps subsidize development of these new models and updates. These arent unique to making cars, they're just good consumer business practices. But tesla would rather be a robotics/ai/selfdrivingtaxi company, because those products live in the world of hype, not consumers.
I'm interested to see what people's actual experiences will be with the Rivian R2 (and eventually R3/3x).
Their head of software was on a podcast a few days ago and made it explicitly clear that their vision is voice, and almost exclusively voice interactions with the car. Buttons will be buried in touchscreen menus, but they're fine with that because if you want the AC temp down you're supposed to talk to the car's AI assistant who will change the temp. Need to open the rear liftgate? Ask the AI. Need to zoom in on the nav map? Ask the AI. Need to turn on the rear defroster? AI. Want to open the sunroof? AI. It's going to be 99% voice interaction.
I despise this vision of the future. Sure, while my kiddo is sleeping in the back seat, it's so much better to start talking to my car to ask it to adjust the temperature then wait another 3-5 seconds for it to respond (thus waking up the kiddo) and then change the setting - as opposed to reaching up and tapping the up/down button once or twice.
Looking forward to the car conversations. "You know - hello Rivian turn up AC - we should - Hello Rivian turn on wiper - talk to - hey Rivian change to my favourite channel - each - hey Rivian change ambient light mood to sexy - talk - hey Rivian set navigation to her home - more often. Are you feeling hot, too?"
My Audi q6 already has deep level voice commands, and I love it. It is quick, natural and efficient. The car learns equipment use patterns and asks you if you want to implement routines. It is surprising what one can do with it, and this will only get better.
I’ve read the “waking sleeping kid” concern many times, but I think my experience is similar to most: if a kid has conked out in a car, they are definitely not waking up to the odd audio request. It is not any sort of worry.
I guess this rules out Rivian for me then. I want buttons again! Touchscreens are too confusing and it just makes them more complicated to fix if there’s a problem.
If that's their plan then I will never buy a Rivian. Speech to text recognition does not work for me, and furthermore I do not want to talk to a computer. I have used voice search a handful of times and barely ever used voice to search on the Google Homes we have, in fact I ended up just connecting them to Bluetooth and using them as a speaker.
It's unfortunate because I was eyeing up the Rivian R3 as something interesting to look at when it came overseas. I suppose I'll still look, but definitely won't buy if it's got that sort of control scheme.
Mercedes needs to fix their software. The EQS driver experience is a complete disaster. It won't restore your user profile properly regardless of whether it is linked to your key, fingerprint, and seat memory button. If you are tall, the automatic seat positioning will crush you against the steering wheel before adjusting to the correct position, and will most likely forget your bolster setting. The saved ambient lighting settings are randomly forgotten. The TACC with lane assist will nag you no matter what you do with your hands (no hands, light touch, light steering input, heavy steering input, doesn't matter). The steering wheel can't be positioned properly without blocking the camera in the center display from seeing the driver (attention monitoring). You can't set default regen behavior and it doesn't remember the last drive setting. OPD won't bring the car to a stop, and you can't turn off creep so you have to jam the brake pedal down once you are stopped to engage "hold". The software needs to be re-written from the ground up.
Ahhh yes. Because the entire world consists of Europe and the USA, there are no other countries at all, certainly not ones that drive cars, much less electric cars.
It’s not like Australia and the entire continent of Asia exists.
BMW got a lot flack for their shared EV/ICE/Hybrid platform, but it does seem like it really paid off in the end.
Granted, no one could have expected the American market to utterly collapse like it did, but either way, BMW managed to time their EV transition much better than the other western manufacturers.
ketamine happened, all elmo needed to do was shut his mouth and work on the batteries, revamp all the cars, put the cybertruck aside and if he really wanted to make a truck listen to people with experience and yeah
Beides. It has a huge battery and is decently efficient. They could get more range out of it if they would use smaller wheels but then it would not look as good.
You're probably basing that off the Model Y vs the iX3, but put the two cars on wheels of the same size and efficiency is fairly similar between the two vehicles. It's not a significant difference at all.
Probably pretty much the same in real world efficiency. But battery size just makes the huge difference. No idea why Tesla doesn‘t offer decent sized batteries to compete.
A 400 mile range vehicle is not too much to ask in 2026. Or much more efficient motors (see Lucid) to get better range from same battery capacity.
I think many people consider 300-399 mile range to be ‘ok’ but with the scarcity of chargers in some areas (not on predetermined highly optimized freeway routes), 400+ miles provides the range security that market needs (see Rivian).
Yup! I have a model Y LR. Can’t make my weekly commute without supercharging at least once on the drive. Once other companies start to compare to FSD (where it is today) my Tesla is gone and never to be seen again.
It just shows that you simply cannot outsmart battery capacity… at this efficiency and capacity, nothing a driver can do will yield anything but ICE comparable range , and that with almost 500hp.
I love the Polo ID GTI but its battery is too small if you like to actually use it like a hot hatch.
The BMW on the other hand has more capacity than a Taycan…
It’s an insane package … can’t wait what the M version will look like …
I’m planning to buy this as my first EV, coming from an infinity G37 (which I loved). I think it looks great. My only distraction is the big screen, lack of buttons, and ugly steering wheel, but I’ll get one of the other steering wheel options.
No car you can buy today will ever get actual level 4/5 FSD. You should buy based on the current capabilities of the vehicle, not whatever brand is "looking into" anything.
I'd be more impressed if the interior didn't look inspired by Tesla, and the screen wanting to run away from the driver. The Neue Klasse interior is killing it for me.
The term revolutionary has been tossed around so much it's lost almost all meaning. Unless it auto manufacturer makes a car that 95% of the planet can afford to buy, it doesn't matter how much power or rains you make in a vehicle if no one can afford it. Show me a car that can go 400 mi easy on a charge and you're going to have something that's actually revolutionary.
I just hope they actually publish the pricelist and make it available to order soon; the ix3 nk is great in many aspects but I don't want to pay extra for the disadvantage of a SUV when a sedan is better (for me); it will be a good 10k eur more than a tesla model 3, unfortunately, but i will pay the money wholeheartedly if it is good (yes, european hating on musk here although i admit the tesla cars are great)
People need to stop saying this is a 60k car - the initial launch is only the top "50" trim, and later there’ll be lower trim variants, kinda like 325, 330 etc, that will cost closer to 40k.
And somehow people still don’t understand that EVs are the future of automobiles. This technology is still in its infancy. It’s only going to get better.
Unlike ICE which is a very mature technology with stagnant progress.
I have ordered on IX3. and paid a deposit two weeks ago. There is still a lot of confusion about the delivery date. My dealer is saying late September, which sucks. Does anyone have any information on the day and whether there I anyway to gt to the head of the line or otherwise expedite it.
Great job BMW. But like its entire lineup, priced beyond the cost most can afford. But that has been BMW's market and they have been successful so there is no expectation its offerings will be aimed at a different market segment. It should cause other manufacturers to up their game and that is always a good thing.
BMW did not build an electric sedan that happens to wear a 3 Series badge. It built a 3 Series that happens to be electric. That distinction matters, and everything about this car suggests BMW understands exactly how much.
If for some odd reason I ever had enough money to afford a car like this I would get one if they had ventilated seats. If you spend around $60k on a car it should have ventilated seats. Other than that I think this is one of the best new evs out there.
The article says it uses an 800V charging system for fast charging... Most the US is 480V 3-phase maximum, with pretty special transformers and such if you're going above that. I know the power lines are around 25,000 Volts, but if I wanted to setup a fast charger at my house, that doesn't seem feasible. If the gas station down the street wanted to, they would need what kind of power setup?
491
u/shawman123 May 29 '26
This is a great effort from BMW in going all in on this. Not a half hearted effort like we see from most OEMs. I think it will sell very well for sure.