Living with the BMW iX3: What still annoys me after two months

07 October 2026

The BMW iX3 Neue Klasse has been a great car for me so far: smooth, efficient and comfortable. Two months in, though, there are a few things I still haven’t got used to and still find very irritating.

All steering wheels should be round

I deliberately chose the roundest steering wheel BMW offers because I already suspected the unusual shape might bother me. Turns out I was right. Most of the time it is perfectly fine, but one situation still catches me out: letting the wheel slide back through my hands after a 90 degree turn.

With a normal round steering wheel, I simply loosen my grip and let the rim glide through my fingers while applying a little pressure to control how quickly it returns to center. It is one of those things you do without thinking.

In the iX3, the constantly changing shape makes the same movement surprisingly awkward. My hands suddenly meet corners and different thicknesses, and what should be a smooth exit from a junction can feel much more clumsy than it has any right to.

I have driven plenty of cars with round steering wheels and never once thought about this process. Which, I suppose, is a pretty good argument for why steering wheels were round in the first place.

The capacitive buttons are simply bad

BMW calls the new controls "shy tech." They are certainly shy. Sometimes a little too much. The fact that the buttons blend into the steering wheel does not bother me much. The fingerprints do. Clean them and enjoy their pristine appearance for approximately thirty seconds.

The bigger issue is actually using them. Some buttons distinguish between a light and firmer press, changing the cruise control speed by either 1 or 10 km/h. In theory - clever. In practice, especially on a bumpy road, I still have no idea what number I am about to get. I might try to add 3 km/h and somehow end up adding 12, 21 or even 30 km/h. At that point it becomes more than irritating and starts feeling like a genuine safety concern.

The current early software adds another layer of unpredictability. Occasionally the buttons simply stop responding, along with their haptic feedback. Sometimes it is only the minus button. Other times the entire left side checks out for the day. Turning the car off thankfully fixes it.

I noticed that it seems to happen more often when I rest my fingers on the controls without actually pressing them, which is exactly what you naturally do when waiting for the right moment to make an adjustment. Physical buttons suddenly sound rather futuristic.

The Panoramic Vision display needs a UX overhaul

The Panoramic Vision display remains one of my favorite pieces of hardware in the iX3. It looks great, the graphics are crisp and the information is positioned exactly where your eyes naturally want it. The problem is what BMW lets you do with it.

When I first saw the custom layout option, I assumed it to mean I could customize it. Instead, you can select from a limited collection of widgets, while some of the useful widgets found in BMW's preset layouts are strangely unavailable.

I would like the trip information and map widgets together in my custom layout. I cannot have that. I would also happily replace the "kWh recuperated" widget in one of the preset layouts with something I actually check regularly. Again, no luck.

Surely switching between layouts is easy, then? Not really. It takes three or four presses on the steering wheel controls, which already are not my favorite part of the car. Doing that reliably without looking becomes surprisingly difficult. You can also change the layout through the main touchscreen, but taking your eyes away from the road and navigating menus at highway speeds is hardly the elegant solution BMW probably had in mind.

A simple shortcut that toggles between your last two layouts would fix most of my complaints. There is already a one press shortcut for displaying the song currently playing. Apparently knowing which song is on is critical information, while changing the entire driver display requires a small administrative procedure.

What's the outside temperature?

This one sounds incredibly minor until you start living with the car. I normally use Waze through CarPlay while keeping my trip information on the Panoramic Vision display. It works great, apart from one small detail - I cannot see the outside temperature. For me, that is basic driver information, especially during the colder months when knowing whether the road might be close to freezing actually matters.

I can exit CarPlay and look at the small temperature reading at the top of the main display, then press the button in the bottom right corner to return to CarPlay. Or I can change the Panoramic Vision layout through the steering wheel controls and then change it back again.

Either option turns checking the temperature into a surprisingly elaborate task. Every BMW I can remember driving simply displayed the outside temperature somewhere in front of the driver. Nobody thought much about it or wrote articles about it. It was just there, quietly doing its job. Now that it is missing from my preferred setup, I suddenly appreciate it enormously.

Hopefully BMW can fix this with a software update. My guess is that once enough iX3 owners go through their first winter and start wondering whether the road outside is wet or icy, I will not be the only one asking for it.

These are all fairly small complaints in the context of an otherwise excellent car, but that is also the point. After two months, the big things about the iX3 still impress me. It is the little everyday interactions that keep reminding me that Neue Klasse is genuinely new, and some parts of it still need polishing.

Do you own an iX3 Neue Klasse? Do any of these things annoy you too, or have you found a way around them? And what would you add to the list?