Gadgetory

used to be SUV the middle letter stood for utility now there's all kinds of variants of SUVs that are less about utility and more about style and we're in one of them right now let's drive it the new wall from BMW and check the tech now what an x4 is depends on your frame of reference if you're coming from x3 this would be the coupe like slightly less practical version of that vehicle built on the same basic platform or if you're gonna put a reference of the x6 the original coupe UV this is a shrunken version but not on the same platform now inside the x4 it's a familiar place if you knew anything about 3 or 4 Series cars in general you know the iDrive interface has become a very excellent place we control it here with this controller that turns kicks and clicks but you've also got a nice sized touchpad that as we'll see writes very quickly with your finger also familiar to BMW buyers will be the fact they nickel-and-dime you to death for everything rear cameras extra heated seats or extra navigations extra traffic is extra bumper sensors for parking is extra a lot of things go on top of that base price we have built-in connectivity that particularly is good at powering online search for destinations you do get some satellite imagery on this vehicle but only to the one mile resolution then it drops down below that and you go back to pure graphics outtie cars I started introducing 4G and it's transformative in the vehicle plus they push satellite imagery all the way down to full magnification speaking of our connectivity a lot of folks are not familiar with this this is a cradle for in this case your iOS device I've got an iPod Touch here now but your iPhone would go there and as you see it's got a lightning connector there a little spring that pops it up a little cooling fan down there in fact when you dock this in here you take advantage of Shore power so you're always charging and neatly and it connects to an external antenna I like that and of course BMWs these days all have just about every media source you'd care about and pretty much none you don't need to care about your music collection refers to your hard drive I would never use that I don't think you would either external devices are more interesting I've got a USB jack underneath that phone cradle bluetooth streaming and of course an auxilary jack for the old-school devices of course we have AM FM HD radio and satellite radio satellite radios extra - as I recall you have for drive modes in this vehicle which is fairly classic BMW stuff starting at the bottom the least responsive is Eco Pro which you can configure what that does then you've got a comfort level Sport and Sport Plus where it starts to pull back some of the stability control but not all all the X's are of course powered by an 8-speed automatic regardless of which powertrain you pick up now if you're under the Prowse a dead giveaway that we had the little engine because look how much space sits right here in front of it that's where the rest would go if you had the inline six in fact we have the 2 liter inline 4 with direct injection complexly variable valve timing as well as a twin-scroll single turbo just about all the greatest hits of modern engine engineering the numbers are pretty good on paper certainly 240 horse 258 pound-feet of torque that's more important especially for a vehicle like this because it weighs over 4,100 pounds but still gets to 60 in a pretty tiny 6 seconds flat MPG is 2028 that 20 makes me a little nervous around town inline 6 is only 1 mpg thirstier let's go for a ride and see which one we'd really like to have under way nice little snarl from this little inline-four especially when you get on the paddles to wind it out or put it in sport or Sport+ ride quality is really good handling is pretty sharp I don't feel the need for the dynamic suspension that is an option this one's got a nice balance of of handling and cornering as well as a good compliant ride what I would like to do is try that in Line six if you're buying one of these you've got a head-to-head test-drive them this car just feels like it's a little bit much for the engine also crappy rear visibility because of the coupe roofline you've got this kind of U shaped eyebrow on the rear window you can't see a damn thing out of the back of this car now as I mentioned you're gonna get nickeled and dimed when you set this car up I wish it was just nickels and dimes we start about mid forty fives for this car delivered with absolutely nothing added and then go see net style from there the big ones 3154 the tech package then you've got 700 bucks for driver assistance that's where your rear cam comes in driver assistance Plus is nearly $2,000 a lighting package to go LED and auto high beam is nearly 2 grand that cool phone cradles about 500 bucks and blessedly were under $1,000 to add Harman Kardon surround sound audio still we're about 55,000 and that's the little engine now for that six that I think the smarter go that's another 3300