Super nice BMW with all the options.This review has been updated with test results for both the X4 xDrive30i and the X4 M40i.
While we often look askance at the consumer trend away from sedans and into crossovers, people want what they want. A decade ago, the first BMW "sports activity coupe," the X6, reminded us of the 1940s when every American carmaker made a four-door fastback. No one wants that again, we thought. Then the smaller BMW X4 came along for 2015, and we wished that these aberrations could join the Oldsmobile Series 60 and the Plymouth De Luxe in history's dustbin.And yet we recently found ourselves at the BMW Performance Center, across the road from the carmaker's Spartanburg, South Carolina, assembly plant, preparing to drive a new, second-generation X4. It now seems like a mainstream vehicle. Normalization of the previously unthinkable is a fearful force to reckon with, in cars as in politics.
The X4, with a fastback profile that distinguishes it from its square-rigged stablemate, the X3, is proliferating more slowly than is the crossover segment at large. In the United States, BMW sold more than 40,000 X3s last year while peddling only 5198 X4s. The Mercedes-Benz GLC coupe is the X4's sole direct analogue as a fastback variant of a more conventional compact SUV, and it too adds only incremental volume to sales of its boxier platform-mate. The GLC coupe may exist only because Mercedes is compelled to counter every addition to the BMW lineup in their bilateral game of marketing Battleship, but these two also compete with the Porsche Macan, the Alfa Romeo Stelvio, and the Range Rover Velar, to name but three that similarly sacrifice the purported utility of crossovers on the altar of styling.To that end, BMW has made the X4 prettier. It still resembles a turtle on stilts—but a less lumpy one. Riding on a wheelbase stretched by 2.1 inches, the 2019 X4 casts a shadow that is either 3.0 or 3.2 inches longer (depending on the exact model) than last year's X4. It's also about an inch and a half wider and a skosh lower. Designers used this larger canvas to render a better-proportioned and less stubby profile, while the entire rear contour is better resolved into a cohesive shape.Added length benefits the interior behind the B-pillar. Rear-seat legroom is up by about an inch, and cargo capacity expands by one cubic foot over last year's X4, to 19 cubes. Aside from the raked roof cutting 10 cubic feet out of the X3's cargo hold abaft the rear seat and bringing the rear door opening down into head-clunk-on-entry territory, the interior is all but identical to the X3's, which is a good thing. X4 drivers ensconced in the all-day-comfortable and supportive sport seats will find the same quality materials, taut panel fits, and informative digital instrument panel. The central iDrive control screen is the same as in the X3, too: responsive, intuitive, and graphically modern.
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