The X3 adopts the interior design of the new 5 Series, with incremental but meaningful changes over the old car. Open the suitably heavy doors and the impressions get even more positive inside. In our test car’s Glacier Silver, the X3 xLine looked smart and undeniably premium. As standard, the X3 comes with an “xLine” styling package that adds some tasteful chrome and silver garnishing, along with attractive 20-inch wheels that can be downsized to 19-inches at no cost. That starts with the exterior look, which ditches the generic sharp lines of the old car and adopts a very muscular, upright stance that apes many of the cues of the bigger X5. The new X3 feels much more like a luxury car than the outgoing version.
#2018 bmw x3 xline vs m sport driver
We just hope their smaller cars, like the 1, 2 and 3 Series, retain their driver focus. Softness hasn’t been what BMWs are about before, but they do it well.
We’ve said similar things about the new 5 Series, which has switched to a formula that favours comfort over sporty driving. It’s a car best driven gently rather than aggressively.
In fact, the new X3’s best attributes aren’t very BMW-like at all: it’s a relaxed performer that is exceptionally quiet and mostly supple and comfortable. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t challenge the 330i for sportiness, but it bests it for overall comfort, refinement, and practicality. That said, we don’t deny the appeal of the SUV form factor, and the X3 does a good job in moving the standard for luxury medium SUVs forward a few inches. For the family buyer that really cares about how a car feels to drive, we continue to favour the 330i Luxury Line Touring ($70,990). But the wagon is more compact, easier to park, substantially sportier to drive, more exclusive, and arguably better-looking.
#2018 bmw x3 xline vs m sport series
Certainly, the 3 Series is cheaper: with the same engine as the X3 xDrive30i we tested, the 330i wagon starts out $6,000 less expensive, although the 3 Series needs a few option boxes ticked to match the X3 on specification. SUVs might be all the rage, but there continues to be a group of intelligent buyers that at least consider the 3 Series as a low-riding alternative of this SUV. The X3 took up less of our garage than expected, but its main rivals, the Audi Q5 and Mercedes-Benz GLC, are even shorter again.įirst, a quick note about the 3 Series before proceeding. It’s only seven centimetres longer than a 3 Series station wagon, but its additional eight centimetres of width makes it a better choice if you occasionally travel with all five seats filled. As BMW’s mid-size SUV, the X3 shouldn’t, and doesn’t, feel massive. A separate model called the X4 is also offered, which is an X3 with a sporty coupe-like roofline. Within BMW’s lineup, the X3 SUV remains roughly paired with the 3 Series passenger car, sitting underneath the larger X5. And it looks better, with a cohesive appearance that takes plenty of cues from the handsome X5. Inside, it’s 80% of the way to a more expensive 5 Series. And yet, they have: in every way, the X3 has been improved. We didn’t love the old model, but buyers did, so you’d think for an all-new generation in 2018, BMW wouldn’t need to entirely transform the vehicle. With over 3,600 registrations in 2017, the X3 narrowly beat the X1 and X5, and it smashed the 3 Series sedan and wagon – upon which the X3 is loosely based – by over a thousand units. That surprised us: the old shape, replaced at the end of 2017, blended into the landscape a little but the numbers don’t lie. Last year, the mid-size X3 SUV was BMW’s best-seller in Australia.
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