2023 BMW IX M60 First Drive: A Big, Bold Battery-Powered Bruiser

Dynamically superb and visually confrontational, the BMW iX arrived a few months ago along with the i4 as the tip of BMW’s mass-market EV spear. Now that tip has been sharpened considerably with the arrival of the iX M60. It takes all of the best features of the iX xDrive50 and adds more power, sharper handling and it still stretches out to 288 miles of range.

Though it shares a lot with the xDrive50, the M60 amps the power up to 610 horsepower, resulting in the ability to sprint to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds. It also charges from 10% to 80% in 39 minutes if it’s attached to a fast DC charger, and it’s clearly aiming up at the aging Tesla Model X.

There are rumors of an even-hotter M70 for 2024, but for now the M60 is the top dog in the iX range, and it doesn’t come cheap. At $106,095, this fastest iX comes at a more than $20,000 jump over the perfectly adequate $84,195 iX xDrive50.

Even at this price, the M60 lines up as a cheaper option than the $114,990 base spec of the Model X Dual-Motor All-Wheel Drive (AWD). Like the X, the M60 will arrive as an AWD dual-motor machine, but it’ll also boast M-car handling, something no other EV SUV can currently boast.

The Tesla is one of a very small number of competitors you can actually buy today. Audi is already there with the e-tron but Mercedes-Benz has yet to dip its toe into the “Big Electric SUV” pond. That will change with the anticipated EQS SUV in 2023. That leaves the M60 and X Plaid as the baddest battery-backed bruisers around. For now.

The iX M60 Recipe

Listed 610 horsepower was supercar territory pretty recently, but as any EV driver knows, it’s torque that you feel when you press the pedal, and the iX M60 is BMW’s torque king. It cracks the 1,000Nm barrier in European numbers, delivering 749 pound-feet in its comfort mode and 811 lb-ft in launch-control mode.

It does this with a 255 hp electric motor on the front axle and a 486 hp motor on the rear, all delivering a combined 532hp for those who just step in and go.

But wait, isn’t it 610, you ask? Yes, but the extra performance from the iX M60 is not what it seems. The maximum power of 610hp is only available in 10-second bursts, and its default 532 hp are only 16 more than the xDrive50’s peak (though it, too, uses a burst-peak).

It’s good for 155 mph of top speed—a welcome 30 mph boost for BMW M boss Frank van Meel in the daily commute from Munich to Ingolstadt on Bavaria’s unlimited autobahns.

It’s a heavy beast, at nearly 5,700 pounds, but its stablemates are all adept at teaching the elephant to tap dance, and the M60 is not different. It rides on 225/50 R21 rubber all round, with a double-wishbone front end, a five-link rear end and air springs and rear-wheel steering.

Charging & Range

It’s all driven by juice from the 111.5 kiloWatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack beneath the floor, and between the axles. It delivers 106.3 kWh of net electrical charge (the same as the xDrive50) and gives an EPA-rated 288 miles of range when equipped with the smallest 21-inch wheels. Opt for 22-inch rims and range drops to 274 miles. That’s well shy of the 20-inch wheel-shod xDrive 50’s 324 miles.

There’s a six-phase double inverter system and BMW achieved the extra motor performance by stretching the rotor by 0.78 inches, and revving to 15,400 rpm.

Both motors attach to single-speed transmissions, and both recuperate energy at up to 220 kW, but only from beyond 124 mph. It regenerates at 150 kW if the driver slows from 62 mph, or 180 kW at 95 mph. In city life, it regenerates at 100 kW from about 30 mph.

The iX M60 is capable of charging at up to 195 kW for the first 12 minutes, which should quickly take it to a 40% charge, and it runs from 10% to 80% in 39 minutes.

Inner Self

One of BMW’s EV lightbulb moments was that they had to walk the walk on being environmentally friendly, not just talk the talk, and so the production of each BMW iX M60 leaves behind about 2 pounds of waste material.

It may even be waste positive, because it uses 60 kg of recycled plastic inside it, in the dash, the seats and even the doors. The fifth-generation BMW electric motors use very little cobalt, and what they do use is ethically sourced by BMW itself, and then given to its suppliers.

We still wish BMW offered a conventional wheel as an option to the standard hexagonal steering wheel, but it gets more intuitive as you use it more.

The 14.9-inch digital instrument cluster blends into the second 12.3-inch multimedia screen behind a single curved piece of glass, and BMW claims it has halved the button count around the cabin. It has a cabin that is fully 5G connected to HQ via its own SIM, and it’s governed by the eighth generation of the BMW iDrive control system, which is way better than stumbling around on the touchscreen setup.

The biggest issue we have in the cabin is the beautiful open-pore wood option for the control panel around the iDrive controller. Yes, it’s lovely to look at and touch, and yes, we know the buttons are backlit, but it’s impossible to read any of the switches on it in bright sunlight. You’re groping blindly every time the sun is out, and it doesn’t even have to be directly shining on the panel.

The only upside is that the voice activation is becoming cleverer by the month and is beginning to recognize and act on even slightly off-base requests, like, “I’m cold.”

The roof is a solid glass panel that darkens electro-chromatically, while the doors are frameless affairs that open at the push of a button, lacking even a handle.

Like the lesser iXs, there’s lots of room thanks to that flat floor and the car always reminds you of its high-tech place in the BMW family by making the carbon-fiber doorframes clearly visible every time you open the doors.

Driving the iX M60

Few other cars offer the breadth of capability of the BMW iX M60. It’s taut, coherent and it feels as though there’s no type of driver or road surface that isn’t within its remit, and it just moves across what it needs to move across.

There would be few cars, combustion, hybrid or otherwise, that manage to feel utterly composed and secure in as many different situations.

For example, even deploying every scrap of thrust from its two motors and using all the braking and all the grip, we never once saw the skid-control system light up to tell us it had been called upon to intervene.

It could make a good impersonation of a near-silent limousine or long-range cruiser with magic-carpet ride comfort, but it can still whip through a series of corners.

With this much weight, it’s clear that it prefers more open bends but it still makes a good show of the tight stuff, and the rear-wheel steering makes its impact felt every single time you go past a quarter of steering lock.

There’s a notable change in its character from each of the modes, but particularly from the Comfort to the Sports settings. The silence in Comfort mode is superbly considered, with the only noise coming from the front tires and whatever swirls of wind aren’t taken care of by the mirror aerodynamics.

The iX M60 carries on the synthesized Hans Zimmer sounds to give a background soundtrack to its acceleration efforts. While BMW insists some people love it, we happily ditched it and let the engineering speak for itself. There is a small amount of whine at very high revs in Sport mode, but that’s reassuring if anything, and otherwise it’s a stupendously refined transport option.

And it’s ridiculously fast without visual ostentation or ever seeming like a one-trick pony, which some products that focus purely on straight-line speed can.

There’s a depth of character here that can slam your spine into the seat like John Cena on the matt, and keep it there, yet can trickle effortlessly through traffic without ever giving a hint of its performance potential.

It will shock some passengers when its owners eventually cut loose and stomp the gas pedal, simply because it’s so serenely gentle otherwise. And if you had to have one BMW to live with for the next decade, and it had to cope with any situation you might encounter, then the iX M60 is easily it.

Now, if we can have a matte finish on that iDrive surround…