Beachside Vacation with a 2011 BMW X3

While I had a few days with the X3 in Chicago, I was able to give it a real-world test drive during a recent vacation with my wife and two young children to see my family in south Florida. Getting five days and a few hundred miles with the X3, which was equipped almost identically to the one we had in Chicago, wasn’t eye-opening, but it made me appreciate it a lot more.

This is as much as we’d typically pack when traveling, and it fit in the X3 just fine.

A trip to the beach — our kids’ first — meant a large umbrella also had to be crammed in with plastic pails, a cooler and a few bags full of beach towels, sunscreen and snacks. Again, the X3 handled the bulk just fine.

Then there were the kids’ car seats. As MotherProof reported, the X3 does a solid job with them, and our two forward-facing convertible seats, including a large Britax Marathon, didn’t lead to much seat-kicking by the tots, even though I forgot the handy iPad car adapter.

The X3 gets an EPA-estimated 19/25 mpg city/highway. While we did mostly highway and suburban driving, it returned only 20 mpg over the 200 or so miles we put on it. However, we had the air conditioner on high as we acclimated from Chicago’s 50-degree spring to 85-degree humid Florida. There were also a few times we left the car running while one parent had to make a run into a store or two for forgotten items.

It’s a simple, well-executed system from the same company that came up with iDrive.

The negatives I had with the X3 in Chicago are still negatives in the land of palm trees. (Throughout our trip, my 3-year-old son kept saying, “There are palm trees everywhere!”) The eight-speed transmission doesn’t shift smoothly, and the stereo system is pretty weak.

However, for a relatively affordable, luxury family-hauler, I was impressed with the X3, especially after spending more time in it. Now if I could only swing a vacation from our vacation in a Chevy Camaro convertible with just the wife.