Video: 2023 BMW XM Review: Light as Three Tons of Feathers, Stiff as a Board

We do have to talk about the way the XM looks. We went in depth when we saw it in Chicago but that was a white and black model. And compared to this, that was inconspicuous. This is Marina Bay Blue metallic with the night gold accent package and it's the most conspicuous I've ever felt driving a press car. I don't really want that, to be honest with you. I am not about being conspicuous, especially conspicuous consumption. But I also got two compliments this morning from guys at the car wash and at the gas station. So if you do want this, you can get it. And the good news is that these are no cost options. So this is a standard paint color and it doesn't cost you anything to get the gold accents including on the gigantic standard 23 inch wheels. But if you don't want it, you don't have to. The interior of the XM is probably my favorite thing about this car. And again, BMW wants us to be the ultimate expression of performance and luxury. And this is a very luxurious place to be. There's Marino leather upholstery. This has the $2,500 two-tone interior option with vintage coffee, Napa leather. It's on the door panels, it's on the dash it's on the rear doors as well. It's sort of meant to look older and BMW says that each treatment will age in its own specific way which sort of makes this a one of one interior. Eventually it's only available with this Silverstone upholstery or a deep lagoon color. And you might be thinking a white and brown interior looks probably a bit out of place with the blue and gold exterior. And to me it absolutely does. It doesn't really match what's going on outside at all. It still looks better than the deep lagoon which is a greenish blue. It's just a lot. There's a lot of styling here at all times. There's no glass roof. Instead you get this textured panel that the only question every passenger will ask is does it open? No, it does not. There's LED lighting around so you can change the ambient lighting color. But comfort wise, this is more of a performance car cockpit. So you get a big center console you get classic ambits everywhere. You get this large touchscreen display with iDrive eight. It works really, really well. It's very responsive. Graphics are crisp and clear. You get all sorts of configurability options. You get a home button you get controls down here if you want to use that. The nice thing I think about this car being an M car is it's sheer configurability. There are a ton of menus for everything. We'll dive into sort of the performance aspect of those in a bit, but it's not information overload and it's not confusing just high tech things for the sake of high tech things. It's just good advanced tech. It's very modern, feels very nice, fairly easy to use. I wouldn't mind more physical climate controls. You get some defrost controls down here but for the most part, climate lives in the menu of the touchscreen. It does stay fixed to the bottom of the screen so you can bring it up easily when you want to. But I would prefer some basic physical controls but it's not terrible for what it is. But we should really check out the backseat which is where the luxury gets dialed up. Another couple notches. So here we are in the backseat of the XM and this is probably my favorite place to be in the car which is so weird for what is such a driver focused performance vehicle. And one of the reasons I'm so confused about this car we noted it in Chicago, these are M lounge seats is what BMW calls them. They're very comfortable, not a lot of bolstering. It's a very nice flat surface across the entire back seat, but it's so comfortable. I have so much room, everything feels great. You have climate controls you have XM branded cushions that match the upholstery. For some reason BMW doesn't want you to forget you're in an M car. So all the seat belts including in the rear have the M striping. But this is the backseat of like a four seater chauffeur driven luxury car or luxury SUV. And it's so comfortable until the car is going. There's so much noise from the twin turbocharged V8 when it's going. And the ride quality is just so terrible that it's very distracting and very uncomfortable. And again, BMW wants you to drive the hell out of this car not sit in the back and be comfortable. That's not what this is for. Get an Alpina, get almost anything. Get a seven series. This is a performance SUV. Why is the backseat like this? It confuses me and it really, really frustrates me 'cause this could be either a performance car and it doesn't need all of this or it could be a luxury SUV in which case it doesn't need to be so bonkers in terms of power or ride or handling. But instead you're left with both and it can't really do either to the best of its ability it is supposed to be indulgent. And if you do have passengers, they are going to be very comfortable as long as you're at a stoplight. So here we are folks driving the 2023 BMW XM. And this is probably what it does best. At least as long as you're sitting where I am. There's a ton of performance here. This is an M car after all. And in fact with 644 horsepower and 590 pounds feet of torque that's system horsepower 'cause this is a plug-in hybrid. This XM, until the more powerful label red debuted, was the most powerful BMW from the factory ever produced. Which is fun because it's still an SUV and that's just not necessarily my ideal body style for performance driving. But yes as I mentioned, is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. So that means there's under the hood a twin turbocharged 4.4 liter V8 along with an electric motor and a battery pack that tops out at a usable 19.2 kilowatt hours. This is my preferred application for plug-in hybrid trains as well, which is extra power. BMW says you can get about 30 miles on an electric charge. The EPA rates it at 31 and I have seen as much as 44 miles of all electric range when I fully charge this but it would be silly to just operate it in electric only mode and try to be as efficiency minded as you could. This is a fun to drive car. They want you to use that power and use it you can. It's incredibly quick. Especially, for a 6,000 plus pound vehicle. It weighs as much as the F-150 that we own for a bit as our car of the year. But BMW says that with launch control activated, you can get from zero to 60 in 4.1 seconds and given BMW's history with zero to 60 SMS, that might be conservative. I wouldn't be surprised if this could do it in less than four. Top speed as standard is 155 miles an hour or 168. If you opt for the M driver's package, which this one has, all wheel drive is standard, it's a bit rear biased and you can adjust that to even more rear bias. When you turn off stability control you get a four wheel drive sport setting even though it's all wheel drive and that's all paired with an eight speed step TRO automatic transmission. That works fairly well. It behaves really well on upshifts. One of our editors described it as sort of how he would drive a manual transmission in performance driving. And I think that's a really good way to put it. It doesn't hold onto gears all the way to the red line when you're letting the transmission shift for itself. But in its most aggressive setting it will go up fairly high into the revs before it upshifts and it just, it feels nice and sporty. It snaps them off real quick as you go up through the gears kick downs are a little clumsier, not objectionably so, but when you really step on it, it'll do a multi gear kick down and if you're really going for it, it will then do sort of another gear. So you'll get from eighth to fourth and then third. And that hesitation sort of feels like the transmission going. Are you sure? Before it really, really commits not especially aggravating, but not the cleanest operation. I would rather it just go right to third. But overall, very, very quick, very, very powerful at least in a straight line. But BMW isn't just about performance driving in a straight line they want you to tackle the curves as well. And this is again, really impressive for what it is. When you go around curves, there's very, very minimal body roll. You do have active roll control in the car as standard so that does obviously help a bit. It's also a M designed steel spring suspension. Other competitors like the Porsche Cayenne are willing to go to an air suspension to give you that variability. But the adaptive suspension here still uses steel springs which for performance driving and feel is great. It works really well. The downside to the suspension however, is that the ride quality is atrocious. There's no good setting that I've been able to find in about a week of driving this around that feels really comfortable at low speeds, high speeds, whatever you feel every bump every expansion joint, everything. And it thwacks against them especially with these 23 inch wheels and tires that look barely thicker than a rubber band. There's just nothing protecting you or any passengers from feeling everything. And that makes it confusing because the backseat looks like such a comfortable place to be. This is such a luxurious cabin that not having a setting with decent ride quality is just it's very, very, very frustrating. Again, there's just no way around it. It doesn't feel good to drive in sort of normal conditions but you'll trade that for things like an exhaust note that sounds like that. And acceleration. That is just that lightning quick, but it's a trade off. And again, the confusing nature of this car. If BMW had just committed to making this an M performance SUV and focusing on the performance honestly the ride quality would've been still notable because it is very uncomfortable, but excusable in a way that because they wanted this to be a luxury car too just isn't there. Everything else at this price point may ride a bit firm if it rides harshly at all. But there's a setting there where you, the driver and your passengers, are isolated from those things in a way that this just doesn't seem capable of doing. The brakes have phenomenal stopping power especially given how heavy the XM is. But in terms of feel, there's just some sort of plug-in hybrid vagueness to it that can be a little frustrating a little hard to modulate, not my favorite thing. You can control the braking setting. There's a sport braking setting or sort of a normal setting. And you can also control whether you want minimal regen or maximum regen in the braking system. Those are two separate things because the XM is highly configurable. Just like any M car, you can adjust those within the touchscreen display. You have a fair number of settings, brakes, you have comfort, and sport, energy recovery which is the regeneration that returns energy to the electrical, to the battery pack. You have a min and max setting you have three settings for the drive train. You have comfort sport and sport plus same for the chassis steering has comfort in sport. You also have adjustable all-wheel drive settings overall. You can make this exactly the way you want in terms of driving experience. And you have these two convenient little M paddles here to keep your presets right at hand. So you want the most hardcore on M one. Boom, you hit it. You've got all those settings in a flash. M two, maybe you want that to be more comfortable, maybe you just want them both to be crazy M one let's you shift using these colossal carbon fiber shift paddles. M one, you just want the transmission to handle things. It's however you want it to be. It's one of the great things about an M car in general and the XM in specific is just you can dial it in pretty much how you want. This remains probably the most confusing car I've driven in a long time. There's a lot of performance and a very luxurious interior but the harsh ride quality really detracts from both and ultimately frustrates. But the good news for shoppers is that if you were in the market for a loud, fast, luxurious and expensive SUV, you've got another choice. For my full review and the rest of our content be sure to head to cars.com. Remember to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss anything from cars.com. And if you enjoy this content, be sure to give us a like. (upbeat rock music)