2027 BMW iX5 First Drive: You’ll Love the Range, But Maybe Not the Looks

Too many manufacturers are getting too ingenious in trying to reinvent the humble doorknob these days, sometimes with fatal consequences. BMW is certainly joining this crowd with the upcoming electric SUV, the iX5. It’s the effective replacement for the iX, the next step up in the model range from the recently released iX3 and a battery-powered alternative to the two-row X5.

The iX5 has small fins at the top of the front and rear doors containing strain gauges that can detect subtle pulling without actually flexing. It’s an extremely complex system that allows for something surprisingly nice: electric doors that actually work.

Pull back the little spoiler and the door opens as far as it will go, relying on built-in sensors to avoid bumping into you or the car you’re parked next to. Get in, step on the brake pedal and the door closes quickly. This is by no means a new technology. Quite a few (mostly expensive) cars have offered this in the past, but I tend to find them extremely annoying.

Most are so slow that I never want to wait for them, so slow that they are difficult to close manually, or so unreliable that I couldn’t trust them not to create an assisted noise in the next car. In the iX5, they actually work, adding a bit more luxury to the electric version of BMW’s second best-selling machine in the United States.

That’s far from the only luxurious touch. The SUV I drove was the 570-horsepower, 593-pound-foot iX5 60 xDrive model, equipped with plush, massaging seats. The matte silver paint on the exterior gives it a premium look, although the styling is polarizing to say the least.

The driving assistance system also includes decidedly high-end touches. BMW evocatively calls it “Symbiotic Drive,” and while that sounds vaguely alien and ominous, it just means the system works with you. On the highway, it will steer itself and you can take your hands off the wheel. But if you want to change lanes, you can either press the steering lever or simply grab the steering wheel and execute the change, then release it.

You can speed up and even slow down manually without the system disengaging, which definitely takes some getting used to. It’s not like an old-fashioned cruise control system that shuts off as soon as you press the brake pedal or launches into full speed as soon as it’s engaged. You can brake to a complete stop during a light, then take off again and the car will resume smoothly.

It works wonderfully, as does the infotainment system, which operates on a curiously angled 17.9-inch touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. Everything is fast and responsive, and even if the built-in AI assistant was a little too eager to intervene every time someone in the car said “BMW,” it was at least capable of finding restaurants and answers to all the stupid queries we expect from our future agent overlords.

Above this touchscreen, located far back on the dashboard, is BMW’s Panoramic Vision display. It stretches from pillar to pillar, with six segments that you can customize to display everything from the current weather to arbitrary images of vintage BMWs. It seems a little big at first, but it’s actually quite nice to have and much easier to see than your average instrument cluster hidden behind the steering wheel.

It’s certainly more useful than the iX5’s final screen, the optional 14.6-inch passenger display. This is located to the right and slightly behind the central screen, to hide it from the driver’s view. That’s because BMW has chosen not to use the same kind of perspective-limiting display technology used by many other premium SUVs.

Instead, the system relies on the driver’s monitoring camera to detect when the driver’s gaze moves toward the passenger display. When this happens, the screen goes blank and the video the passenger is watching stops. The screen turns back on when the driver looks away, but the passenger must manually resume watching the video. As far as user experience goes, it’s not ideal.

The most luxurious feature of the iX5 might be the range. The iX5 carries a prodigious 144 kilowatt-hour battery suspended under the cabin. It charges at a remarkable 460 kW via the NACS port, enough to go from 10 to 80 percent in 22 minutes if you can find a charger with enough power.

BMW hasn’t completed its EPA testing, but says it expects more than 450 miles on a charge. To prove that this is achievable, one of BMW’s engineers drove over 500 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles without stopping and still had 50 miles left.

My road trip was a bit shorter, but I spent about six hours behind the wheel of a pair of new BMW SUVs. The first half I was in the X5 40 xDrive, the internal combustion version. The second half was electric, and that was my clear preference.

Although the gas-powered X5 has good power at higher speeds and makes a pleasant noise when I mash it, the throttle response on the iX5 was infinitely sharper. It’s certainly heavier, but the lower center of gravity makes it even more engaging in corners, and it can do the same stopping trick as the iX3, relying on the electric motors to stop so smoothly that if you close your eyes you literally can’t tell when the wheels stop rolling.

But honestly, there’s not much between the gas-powered X5 and the battery-powered iX5. It’s a big change in positioning from the even more polarizing iX and the previous generation X5. Although similar in many ways, these two did not look or drive anything alike.

For this generation, BMW is bringing the family together, making the internal combustion and battery electric versions nearly identical. They’re even priced similarly, with the X5 50e plug-in starting at $77,500 and the iX5 starting at $79,800.

Perhaps this, combined with the generous range, will finally help break down some of the electric vehicle stigma that still plagues the American automotive landscape. If not, maybe cool automatic doors will appeal to people. Yes, you can also get them on the gas-powered X5, but they cost more there.