Credit: BMW

MALAGA, Spain—Late last year, we got our first chance to drive the new BMW iX3. An all-electric version of one of BMW’s best-sellers, the electric SUV is arguably the new head of the class in the competitive premium SUV EV segment, with good driving dynamics and an extremely efficient electric powertrain. The next new BMW EVs to use the company’s Neue Klasse platform is the one we find more interesting here at Ars, even if it won’t sell as well. It’s the 2027 i3, or BMW’s first 3 series EV, and it goes into production in Munich this August.

A proper sedan

It has been a few years since we first saw the Neue Klasse sedan concept, and it has mostly remained faithful to that design as it made the transition from concept to production model. Light has replaced chrome for BMW’s traditional kidney grille, which here contains kidneys within kidneys. Like the iX3, there’s a valley down the hood, but here the kidneys are long and wide, unlike the bucktooth look of BMW’s new SUVs.

The biggest change is at the rear. Sadly, the i3 has little of the elegance or charm of the concept aft of the rear axle, but the demands of real-life practicality meant BMW needed to raise the rear deck a few inches in order to give the car proper cargo-carrying capacity. And yes, the rear window does have the traditional “Hofmeister kink.” At launch, the i3 will be just a sedan, but BMW showed us a silhouette of a wagon variant—Touring in BMW-speak—that we very much hope crosses the Atlantic at some point.

The interior looks much like the iX3, only with less headroom, which means there are physical buttons on the center console and a trapezoidal touchscreen infotainment system, plus a rather ugly new multifunction steering wheel. There’s also the Panoramic Vision display and an onboard AI personal assistant with speech recognition powered by Alexa. The rear seat has plenty of room thanks to the inherent packaging advantages of an EV, although the rear occupants sit a little higher up than those in the front.

As the i3 will be the second EV to use the platform, we already know some of the technical details, such as BMW’s 6th-generation powertrain. At the core of the car is its 800 V battery pack, which uses new cylindrical cells that are 20 percent more energy-dense by volume than the prismatic cells you’d find in one of BMW ‘s 5th-gen EVs like the i4. The cell-to-pack design further increases the energy density of the pack compared to the previous generation. It’s able to DC fast-charge at up to 400 kW, and BMW is predicting up to 440 miles (708 km) of range, a 30 percent improvement on its 5th-gen EVs.

At launch, BMW will offer an i3 50 xDrive, which uses an asynchronous motor at the front axle and an electrically excited synchronous motor at the rear, with a combined output of 463 hp (345 kW) and 476 lb-ft (645 Nm). BMW says that energy losses are 40 percent lower than its 5th-gen powertrain, as well as being 10 percent lighter and 20 percent cheaper to make. The whole thing is a lot more sustainable, too. It uses about 30 percent recycled materials, and there’s a greater use of mono materials to make recycling much easier at the car’s end of life. Together with extensive use of renewable energy throughout the supply chain, BMW says that the i3 50 xDrive takes as little as a year to break even with a gasoline-powered model in terms of carbon output.

The rear of the i3 is the most changed from the concept.
Credit: BMW

It should be good to drive

The 3 Series built its reputation on stellar driving dynamics, and BMW knows the i3 will need to deliver on that to win over enthusiasts. Weight distribution is close to 50:50, with a low center of gravity thanks to the battery pack. It has softer springs than the iX3 for better ride comfort, with less-stiff top-mount bushings, different stiffnesses for the antiroll bars, and a stiffer connection to the rear wheel carriers.

Torque delivery is rear-biased out of corners, and under regenerative braking the rear axle regens more than the front at first to stabilize the car. The car can also supplement regen braking with the friction brakes at an individual corner, should the road conditions require. You probably won’t use the friction brakes much in day-to-day driving, though; BMW says regen should handle 95 percent of braking events, and in one-pedal driving mode, the i3 will make the smoothest stop of any BMW yet.

The Neue Klasse platform is a true software-derived car, which means BMW has re-written all the traction, stability, and antilock braking control systems from scratch. Here, BMW says software makes the real difference, not the speed of the processors in the “Heart of Joy” high-performance computer that controls the driving dynamics. BMW even says the i3 should be easier to drift than its predecessors.

Sometime next year, the electric M3 joins the party, too; take a look at this article from January for a fuller rundown of what we know about that car’s quad-motor setup and driving dynamics.

BMW, take the wheel

Another liquid-cooled computer is responsible for running the i3’s safety systems and driver assists. The automaker wants its partially automated driving systems to complement the driver and work in synergy with them, using gaze-tracking and steering inputs to determine if and when to intervene, so it shouldn’t try to correct the steering if it sees you’re intentionally crossing a lane marker, but will if it thinks you’re doing it due to inattentiveness. To ensure safety, rules-based algorithms (as opposed to machine learning) make the final call on interventions.

There are two levels of driver assist available. The more basic one complies with the UN R79 regulations and requires the driver to keep their hands on the wheel during operation, but it will operate above 81 mph (130 km/h). The more advanced mode allows you to go hands-off with robust driver monitoring and is the first OEM system to comply with UN R171 regulations, BMW told Ars. This mode has much stricter compliance with posted speed limits, but will also do things like come to a complete halt for red lights and then drive off again when green, at least in Germany. BMW says that future updates will allow the system to cope with roundabouts and turns as well. There’s also a remote parking feature that you can operate via the BMW smartphone app, making real a feature we saw in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

Credit: BMW

Pricing and an exact EPA mileage should be available closer to summer.