Just as expected, BMW has decided to spare us the suspense and officially introduced the iX3, a battery-powered SAV making use of the X3 chassis.
On the outside, the fake front grille, the badge and the blue highlights are your only visual cues for telling the iX3 from its gasoline-driven counterpart. The dimensions change ever so slightly: the length grows from 4.72 to 4.73 meters, while the width goes down from 1.9m to 1.89m and the height from 1.68m to 1.67m. The wheelbase of 2.86m remains unchanged.
The car weighs in at 2,185 kilograms (4,817 pounds) and packs an 80-kWh battery with 74 kilowatt-hours of usable capacity. WLTP-rated range amounts to 460 kilometers (285 miles), and replenishing the charge from zero to 80% full takes 34 minutes as long as you can find a 150-kW charging station.
The only electric motor there is sits on the rear axle, driving it with 286 PS (210 kW) and 400 Nm (295 lb-ft) of torque. This is enough to get the bulky SAV from standstill to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 6.8 seconds, and the limit lies at 180 km/h (112 mph). A dual-motor AWD spec may debut in the near future, although no official confirmation exists at this time.
Production of the new BMW iX3 has already started at the BMW-Brilliance joint enterprise in China.