All-electric BMW iX 50 SUV performance bargain of the century

We are on the tip of Africa in a country where the government grapples with the simple concept of keeping the lights on.

It’s a daily struggle out on the streets due to traffic lights being out and then only to get home to a dark house and no food on the table.

But be this as it may, nothing is going to stop the influx of high-end electrified vehicles and one of these is the nauseatingly fast BMW iX xDrive50i.

I could spend pages telling you all about the likes of the network architecture, software, digital services, connectivity and automated driving functions technology found onboard this BMW.

But we have covered the launch of this car already and BMW has a website full of information if you really want to know things like this.

Everyday ride

I am only here to tell you how this car of the future drives because it’s still hard for so many to comprehend what this means on a day-to-day basis in terms of performance.

And the elephant in the room, which is staying charged.

If you are going to treat an electric car like a petrol car and wait till it is empty before you decide to fill up, you are going to waste a lot of time waiting around while the battery charges.

Batteries take time to charge, and you run the risk that at the very moment you need to fuel up, the power gets switched off.

ALSO READ: BMW iX priced for South Africa as new flagship M60i debuts

So, treat your electric car just like you would a cell phone. When you get home, put the car on charge, that way you always have power to go anywhere.

The BMW iX xDrive 50 here has a big 111-kW battery under the floor that offers around 500 km of real-world driving, but the time it takes to charge varies dramatically.

Charging

The least logical way would be charging at home with the emergency standard three-pin wall plug. This will take you 50 hours.

Obviously, you will have a BMW sponsored wall mount outlet that will get this job done in around 11 hours, and that is the way I would go most of the time.

And if you hunt around on the PlugShare app, you will find a rapid 60 kW charger and then you can top up in a matter of minutes while you grab a bite to eat.

A point worth noting is that power at my house costs R2.75 a kWh but double that at a public rapid charger point.

So be smart, charge your car at home. And when you do this, it will cost you R300 to fill up and get that 500 km.

I will do the maths for you, R300 will get you around 14 litres of fuel today, and you won’t do much more than 100 km with this fuel in a SUV that offers you 385 kW of silent power and 785 Nm of instant torque. Consumption wise, this iX is the performance bargain of the century.

The iX xDrive50 has one electric at the front axle and one at the rear axle, and they both put the power down to all four wheels via BMW’s xDrive system.

This translates into a rapid tested time of 0 to 100 km/h in just 4.56 seconds, while going onto a supercar-like quarter mile time of 12.71 seconds at 185.22 km/h.

The fun, well for some, stops a mere 35 metres later at a true speed of 190 km/h.

Go-to offering

Why it wasn’t fun for me was because no matter what I did, I could not help getting nauseous each time I drove the iX.

For the rest of you, having a full-size SUV that can do 190 km/h in less distance than it takes to get onto the highway and give you the equivalent of three litres per 100 km while doing so, will make this R2 175 000 BWM iX50 the go-to offering if you don’t want to spend similar money on the more vocal X5 M Sport derivatives.

To download our full test results, click on the link below.

For more information on the BMW iX50, click here.