BMW X5 hybrid 2015 Review

Before this car, the only plug-in hybrid BMWs you could buy were the i3 and i8. And they're not the sort of cars that will suit everybody, nor are they particularly vexatious on the school/family runs that are the X5’s staple.

If it seems like a BMW-i model signature is to demand the driver gets out of the car before anybody else can emerge, you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing in the X5. Hundreds of thousands of families around the world can attest to that.

It does seem a bit odd that BMW has waited this long to deliver a plug-in hybrid bearing its own badge (and not a sub-brand), especially when Porsche already has one that’s dimensionally similar to the X5 in the Cayenne S E-Hybrid, and Audi and Mercedes-Benz will both have plug-in cars here this year.

That, and Audi’s all-new Q7 will have a plug-in hybrid diesel, with 50km of pure electric range, available in Europe later this year and Australia next year, when the X5 xDrive40e will also arrive here.

This is an SUV that aims to be all things to an enthusiastic, though limited, number of people. It’s a permanent all-wheel drive SUV with a 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine sitting up front and a disc-shaped electric motor sitting between the engine and eight-speed automatic transmission.

BMW says that’s good for CO2 emissions of 78g/km on the NEDC hybrid cycle, and fuel consumption of as little as 3.3L/100km, helped by stuff like aero fiddles, low rolling resistance tyres and taller gearing.

The 96-cell lithium-ion battery is on the small side, at 9kWh of charge, and while it also supplies the on-board 12-volt power supply, its main occupation is as the fuel tank for the 83kW/250Nm electric motor.

When that’s not enough juice, or when you’re hitting the highways, there’s 180kW of power from the 1997cc modular four-cylinder engine. From the stock BMW toolkit of motors, the TwinPower motor has direct fuel-injection, variable valve timing and variable valve lift, plus a twin-scroll turbocharger.

That gives it 350Nm of torque at just 1250rpm – which is just what you need when you’re trying to pick up and carry a full-size SUV. Its power peaks from 5000 to 6000rpm, so the performance spread is broad, with the fossilized and electric power systems joining forces to give it a total of 230kW and 450Nm.

Even when all of its efforts are brought to bear, they work very hard. There are local-emission benefits from its ability to run as a pure electric car, but the cost is another 250kg, give or take, on top of the none-too-anorexic standard X5. You’re looking at 2230kg on the dry-weighted DIN scale or 2305kg on the less friendly EC figure (that includes fluids and 75kg for a driver).

Still, it pushes out to a claimed top speed of 210km/h, which BMW limited because, frankly, nobody outside Germany needs any more than that, with the electric motor helping the petrol engine all the way to the limiter.

BMW claims it will hit 100km/h in 6.8 seconds (again, with the electric motor fizzing things along before they get to the transmission), but it’s not as quick in its pure-electric mode, obviously. How quick it actually is as an electric car, BMW’s not saying, but it does limit it to 120km/h because it’s an inefficient use of the available resources to run electrically at highway speeds.

That’s the same reason its charge mode (though it’s called Save on the big button on the centre console that controls the drive modes) counter-intuitively shuts the petrol motor down at the lights when you want to charge the battery up. It’s actually a more effective use of the systems to shut it down and charge up the battery later, when it’s running anyway.

This is a new button for BMWs (and expect to see more of it) and though the car defaults into Auto eDrive (when both power units can work together under the big brain’s directives), you can also choose the Save or Max eDrive modes.

Save uses the most fuel because it can either hold on to the battery’s charge until you want it (if, for example, you’re on a highway and you want to drive electrically later on in the city) or uses the petrol motor as a generator (as well as the main powerplant to move the car) to charge up the battery on the run. Max eDrive is the full electric mode.

Most of the mechanical bits are standard fare for the X5, though there are differences. The higher boot floor reduces load capacity to 500 litres and rules out a third row of seats, for example, and its extra mass convinced BMW to give it the dynamic damper control and self-levelling rear-end as standard equipment.

There are two different controllers that govern how the X5 xDrive40e actually drives – well, five if you include the steering wheel and the throttle and brake pedals. But the main ones are the now-traditional BMW toggle that switches the accelerator response, gear shifting patterns, skid-control systems and damper control between Sport, Comfort and EcoPro set-ups.

It starts in its Auto eDrive mode, which means you push the start button and the engine doesn’t start. The electric motor is ready to go, though, and clicking back BMW’s universally shared stubby gear lever and tapping the accelerator pedal is all the evidence you need of that.

Of course, that assumes there is juice in the battery. If it’s flat, the petrol motor just starts instead. (Flat, of course, is relative: it’s self-destructive for lithium-ion batteries to charge below around 35-40 per cent or above about 80 per cent, though the exact figures for the X5 are secrets BMW doesn’t want to reveal. Usually, if it tells you it has 50 per cent electric charge, it’s really telling you it’s got half of the regularly usable bit, so somewhere around 60 per cent of the actual charge.

True enough, the X5 works as advertised from a full charge, which takes a tick under four hours to deliver from a standard household powerpoint.

Left in the automatic mode, it cleanly swaps its motors in and out when they’re needed and, when you’re in EcoPro mode; it “sails” by disconnecting the powertrain when you’re off the accelerator. Even when it’s running on electric power, a prod of the throttle past the détente kicks the petrol engine in seamlessly to add a bit more oomph to proceedings.

It’s clean, brisk and the 2.0-litre engine feels smoother here than it does in the 3 Series. There’s little noise from the electric side of the powertrain though, and it just gets on with getting on. You occasionally here the battery fan fire up down the back, but not much else.

There is enough strength at low revs to move the big rig briskly and you rarely regret that it doesn’t have more to give. It’s fast enough for something with this brief.

It’s also flexible enough; with the bi-motor strength helping it overtake with enthusiasm and the system is so sophisticated it’s barely possible to tell when the electric motor is in or out.

And, once it’s out of electrical power, the petrol motor does a manful job of moving the X5 along on its own, though it’s not a brisk machine anymore when that happens.

It’s the automatic transmission that shines though, purely because it’s so invisible and seamless in its work. It would be very easy to have a jerk or wobble here and there when there’s so much going on, but it doesn’t.

There are odd things, though. Perhaps to mask the taller gearing, BMW has taken the linearity completely out of the accelerator pedal. Give it 10 per cent throttle in Sport mode and the hybrid will give you maybe 60 per cent of the available performance before tapering off towards full throttle. It’s an effect that is still there even in the EcoPro mode, though it’s less pronounced.

There’s also a bit of tennis-ball squishiness in the brake pedal, because instead of actually braking when you push the pedal lightly, it’s actually using the electric motor to harvest between 5kW and 15kW of energy. It’s particularly pronounced in the Sport mode, oddly enough, and not the EcoPro mode. Push harder on the pedal and it feels more traditional, without every feeling completely traditional.

But that’s just nibbling around the edges of X5 normalcy, and you’d get used to it in a week.

More concerning though was our inability to match BMW’s range claims for the hybrid’s electric power. Cruising in normal afternoon traffic in Munich, we timed the instrument cluster’s range readout losing a percentage point of battery power every nine seconds.

Munich’s topography doesn’t exactly replicate Toowoomba or Sydney’s North Shore, so that’s a bit disappointing. Nine hundred seconds is about 15 minutes of driving. I don’t remember a single day of commuting in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane that was over in 15 minutes.

When we quizzed the Timo Averbeck, from the X5 xDrive40e’s Functional Integration of Total Vehicle department about the theoretical-versus-practical range, he admitted its real-world electric range would be less than the NEDC figure.

“We can manage 25-27km, realistically, with cooling and heating and when it’s extremely cold you could have less range,” he said.

Exactly how much juice you have and how much range you have can be seen on a smartphone, thanks to the app developed for the i8, but tweaked for this car. Plus, the X5 PHEV uses the very clever Professional version of BMW’s navigation system to manage the power best, allocating the car’s electrical resources for the parts of a trip that it’s most effective for.

Still, we used that system on a route mapped out by BMW, floated along with the rest of the traffic and still came up well short of being able to get across town on electric power.

“If you do your daily trip and you have 25 per cent battery left, you are not using that 25 per cent and you have higher weight and fuel consumption and it ruins the handling because it’s heavier,” Averbeck said. “And it costs more.”

Fair enough, but most drivers could say the same thing about the back seat, yet they don’t buy many two-seat cars, do they?

And once all that power-point juice was gone, you’re left with a 2.2-tonne machine being driven solely by its four-cylinder engine.

“If you start with a flat battery or you drive with a flat battery, you are on a comparable level of consumption with the 35i, so about 10 to 11L/100km,” he said.

To put it another way, that’s 232 to 255g/km of CO2, which is a very different number from 73, which it claims when everything is working as it should be.

The important thing, though, is that BMW has taken the step, finally. Its electrification gurus were a bit overwhelmed getting the i3 and i8 sorted out, which is why the X5 plug-in was a bit slow getting into showrooms.

But the X5 isn’t as young as it once was and compared to Audi’s new Q7, for instance, there are issues unrelated to the powertrain (like ride quality, handling accuracy and road and wind noise, not to mention interior trim levels) where the X5 xDrive40e is showing its age.

It also loses 120 litres of luggage capacity to the standard X5 powertrains, ruling out a third row of seats and cutting it down to 500 litres (though you get 1720 litres with the rear seats folded down).

The X5 xDrive40e is a good, smooth but slightly disappointing first effort at a plug-in hybrid from BMW. The upside is that the powertrain gubbins all work seamlessly and beautifully when it works. The downside is that they don’t work for long enough.

2015 BMW X5 xDrive40e pricing and specifications:
Price: Under $145,000 (estimated)
Total system output: 230kW/415Nm
Engine: 2.0-litre turbocharged inline four-cylinder petrol
Output: 180kW/350Nm
Engine: Synchronous electric disc motor
Output: 83kW/250Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Fuel: 3.3L/100km
CO2: 77g/km
Safety rating: Not tested