Long-Term Road Test Wrap-Up
Date: November 2009
Current Mileage/Months in Fleet: 40,000 miles/13 months
Average Fuel Economy/Range: 16 mpg/360 miles
Service: $0
Normal Wear: $1631
Damage and Destruction: $3516
Our long-term test of the BMW X6 began with a more basic premise than have most of our other long-term tests. Usually, our objective is to find out what a car is like to live with for 40,000 miles, but with the X6, our goal was simply to find out why a person would live with it for 40,000 miles. Its apparently random combination of skills and strengths seemed about as logical as crossbreeding your chocolate Labrador with a ham radio.
To further muddy the equation, we piled more than $16,000 worth of options onto our X6 xDrive50i’s sticker, raising the price from $63,825 to an as-tested $80,270. Some of those options—like the $400 rearview camera—are absolute necessities. Most of the rest—like the $2000 Premium package that nets self-dimming mirrors and a universal garage-door opener that not one of us ever used—are not. And the $1700 rear-seat entertainment system’s poorly placed screen fostered such intense frustration that we would pay BMW for the privilege of jamming a pickax through it. For a full list of optional equipment, check out our long-term X6 introduction.
Big Love for a Big Vehicle
From the start, praise bloomed thick in the X6 logbook. Staffers were smitten—and bemused—by gifted footwork that belies the truck’s size, accompanied by lines of communication between car and driver as wide open as a postapocalyptic autobahn—for something this big, anyway. We even used it to tow on a couple of occasions, and our one complaint—one that would be parroted again and again throughout the X6’s stay with us—was poor rearward visibility. The snorting twin-turbocharged V-8 and tremendous brakes had no trouble with our heaviest loads (upwards of 4000 pounds) and encouraged all manner of bad behavior. Unladen, the X6 clicked off accelerative benchmarks in short order: 0 to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds, the quarter-mile in 13.8 at 102 mph, and a top speed electronically truncated at 157 mph.
After 40,000 miles of antisocial behavior, those times shuffled around to 5.0 seconds to 60 and the quarter in 13.7 at 101. Braking and handling numbers also stayed consistent, with the stopping distance from 70 mph increasing two feet—from 163 to 165, a difference attributable to perhaps a thicker cotton sock on the test driver’s foot—and skidpad grip dropping from 0.89 g to a mere 0.87, still a shocking number for a ute this size.
So impressed were we by the X6’s dynamic brilliance that, immediately after taking delivery at BMW’s factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, we detoured to probably the best-known driving road in the east—the Tail of the Dragon—on the drive home. Forty thousand miles later, the mighty brick’s tenure came full circle at Michigan’s GingerMan Raceway, where we wrangled it around the track with verve that astounded the gaggle of Porsche drivers present. The three 996 Turbos and two 996 GT3s proved out of our league, but the driver of a 997 Carrera S had trouble shaking the maroon barn from his mirrors until the X6’s brakes began to fade after too many hot laps. That one chink in the X6’s dynamic armor healed after a cool-down lap, and we fell into a rhythm of two-on, one-off that we repeated without fail for the remainder of the evening. Nobody here remembers the last 5200-pound vehicle to take such abuse so joyously. Credit the go-go-gadget torque-vectoring rear differential, which mitigates understeer and slings the X6 around like the basket of a trebuchet.
It’s Not Always Sunny in Munich
Aside from the rear-seat entertainment system—have we mentioned that staving in the skull of the devil himself wouldn’t be as satisfying as stuffing into a giant cannon the person responsible for its placement and blasting him at point-blank into a very spiny brick wall?—we had a few other complaints. The running boards cost $300. They aren’t worth it. They look like a pair of wart-riddled splints wrapped around the X6’s ankles and kept our calves dirty year-round. The backup camera—a necessity with the X6’s miserable rearward visibility—took so long to load its image on screen that we often gave up waiting for it and just backed over the damn kids (they’re healing nicely), and in anything less than perfect lighting, it was useless anyway. (Is that a wormhole into John Malkovich’s consciousness behind me? No, it’s just after sundown, that’s all.) Hire a spotter for backing up.
Then, of course, there’s iDrive. All we’ll say is this: If iDrive were actually charged with driving, it would get from our Ann Arbor office to the corner liquor store by first circumnavigating Alaska, then teleporting to New Zealand and taking a ferry to L.A., and then driving back to Michigan in reverse. A new and vastly improved iDrive has recently infected BMW and is slowly spreading throughout the lineup, a pandemic that cannot travel fast enough.
BMW’s Ultimate Service program covers regular service costs for the first 50,000 miles or four years, and the vehicle monitors its internal conditions, alerting the driver when it wants a regular service. The X6’s warranty thankfully lasts for the same period. An early problem with the electrical system was traced to the incorrect battery being installed at the factory, and we had a couple of other instances of warnings cropping up once, only to disappear on restart and never surface again.
Our biggest problem showed up shortly after the 28,000-mile mark, when the instrument cluster refused to communicate with the X6’s central computer and wouldn’t allow the technicians to reset the service interval. (The machines have become self-aware! They’re taking over!) So they ordered a new instrument cluster that, when installed, kept telling us the front brake pads needed replacing even though they had been determined to be well over the minimum thickness. A month later, on a return visit, the pads were found to be five millimeters thinner than reported earlier—an unlikely amount of deterioration in just a month—and replaced at no cost under the free maintenance program, which solved the problem.
My, What a Big Appetite (for Tires) You Have
Despite the warranty covering mechanical and electrical problems, we had a few expenses above the gallon of premium we averaged every 16 miles. Wear and tear were major financial burdens. Our set of summer rubber wore out in 18,000 miles, and a new set blew a $1631 hole in our expense account. Consumers shouldn’t expect to see that sort of wear—we’re a bit rougher on tires than most drivers—but if there is one compromise that must be made to make a 5200-pound vehicle capable of footwork this fancy, it’s tire life. And although we don’t count winter rubber in our official tally, two Pirelli Scorpion ice-and-snow tires—$980 for four—fell victim to Michigan roads in the course of two weeks for an added cost of $490. Over the term of our test, this sort of abuse would eventually result in three of the four wheels being bent, but not severely enough to necessitate replacement.
Our other major money pit was windshields. Blame it on the X6’s prodigious passing power and the vulnerability caused by the ensuing close stalking distances, but we cracked two windshields, and driving around in an $80,000 vehicle with a cracked windshield just felt so déclassé. So we replaced the glass both times at a cost of $1758 per. Yowch.
The Answer You’ve All Been Waiting For: What Is It?
We can excuse the electrical problems as first-year teething issues. Self-inflicted fiscal atrocities aside, our biggest complaints—the ergonomic quibbles—are peripheral matters. On all counts of core competency and dynamic virtuosity, the X6 excels. We set out to determine what the BMW X6 is, and this is our answer: It’s a fully capable, beautifully finished, and superbly comfortable four-place sports car with a trunk big enough for almost any adventure and the ability to tow up to three tons of what won’t fit inside. It’s the unfailing utility of a camel and the blinding speed of a cheetah in a silhouette that bears minor resemblance to both but somehow still looks great. It’s completely nonsensical but so good at everything that it doesn’t matter. It’s the ultimate automotive non sequitur, but above all, it is good.
