Hello again from the driver's seat of a 2024 BMW iX. Not just any iX, the one that I purchased (well, leased) with my own money so that you can get a feel for the ownership experience without having to drop the coin on one yourself.
If you haven't been following along, we're approaching a full year of ownership of this 2024 BMW iX xDrive 50, purchased in September. It's nearly option-free, but despite that, it hasn't been disappointing in either its ride quality or its range.
It's the range that I'm going to focus on this update. In our winter update back at the beginning of the year, I showed that our iX was still delivering impressive longevity on a charge despite the frigid temperatures. Our iX, with the 20-inch wheels, is EPA-rated for 307 miles, which works out to be about 2.9 miles per kWh given the 105-kWh battery pack.
In the winter, we still saw 2.6 mi/kWh, an impressive result for any EV, never mind one that's this big. That came in real handy over the holidays, with my wife and I taking the iX up to visit family in Watertown, NY, about 180 miles away.
So if the iX is that good in the winter, how is it in the summer? It's good. It's really good.
We're increasingly seeing trip averages over 3.3 mi/kWh, as high as 3.7, vastly exceeding the iX's EPA figures and giving us a projected range approaching 400 miles on a full charge.
But we've all seen EVs putting big numbers on the dash writing checks they can't cash. Our iX, though, proved its capability at a time when it was very sorely needed.
Gallery: 2024 BMW iX Summer Update
Crowd Struck
Remember the Crowdstrike debacle? Just over a month ago, most of the world's airlines ground to a halt thanks to an ill-timed and poorly tested software update that killed damn near every Windows machine on the planet. While the airlines have finally cleared up their backlog of passengers, they're still reeling from the financial losses, Delta taking the extraordinary step of suing Crowdstrike to recoup its $500 million losses.
That whole situation hit me pretty hard. I was in Amsterdam that morning, a Friday, well and truly settled into my seat for the eight-hour and 50-minute flight back to Detroit, where I'd catch a regional leg back to my home in Albany, NY. The seatbelt sign was on, the flight attendants were going through their final checks, and we had about 15 minutes to go before pushback when the pilot came on the radio.
"Ahhh... we're being told to hold at the gate due to some sort of system outage," he said. "We've got everything we need up here to go, and we expect this shouldn't take too long to figure out."
Dear reader, it did take a long time. We sat there for about three hours with little in the way of updates other than, "Don't worry, none of your connections are flying either, so nobody's missing anything." Meanwhile, I was doom scrolling through all the Crowdstrike news, watching the list of affected systems grow and grow.
They eventually canceled the flight, and given all of Delta's systems were utterly FUBAR'd, rebooking wasn't possible. Late that night, after hours of trying, I finally got myself on a flight home Sunday night. Cue an unwanted weekend in Amsterdam.
Now Amsterdam is a great town, surely one of the best, but after a couple weeks straight on the road I was desperate to get home. After hours of trying every route I could find, I finally managed to secure myself a (middle) seat on a flight back to the U.S.A.
The catch? Delta could only get me as far as Boston. I'd be on my own after that.
I called my wife, who graciously offered to drive the 175 miles out to come and pick me up. She topped the car up to a 100 percent charge while I was winging my way out to the Atlantic (we typically cap it at 80 percent), then headed out onto I-90 to meet me at Logan.
Six hours and 19 minutes of driving later, when we finally rolled in our garage back home, I had a numb back-side and a raging headache, but amazingly, we still had an indicated 22 miles of range showing on the BMW. We'd planned to make a stop at the Holyoke, MA Electrify America chargers thanks to their proximity to I-90, but when we got to that exit and the car was still predicting we'd make it home with five percent remaining, we decided to go for it.
And sure enough, we made it home without issue, a 351.5-mile round trip on a single charge with room to spare. And this was at highway speed, with climate control on and driving normally. No hypermiling was required to well exceed the EPA's 307-mile rating.
Road Trippin'
We've made a few other trips this summer, including the 700-mile trip out to New Hampshire I mentioned back in June, and another 360-mile run up to Watertown, NY, both of which delivered similar levels of efficiency as that unwanted Boston round-trip.
But it's not all good news with the warmer weather. The iX's ventilated seats continue to disappoint, doing a far better job of filling the cabin with noise than reducing the temperature of your posterior. My wife, too, is frustrated with the lack of granularity of fan speeds. The maximum manual fan speed is too low, she says, while the "Max AC" mode is too high.
But in the grand scheme of things, like our other pet peeves, these are minor points. The weather may be changing but the iX's ability to satisfy is not. We continue to be extremely happy with our purchase and routinely fight over who gets to drive it when.
