It’s the way of good cars that, on driving one, you begin to embody it: to become it. In a hot hatch I am young and lovely and never was a nerd. (I will get to the platonic ideal of the nerd’s car. I fear it is a Honda Jazz.) In a Rolls-Royce I am laconic unless I am driving, in which case I am a wreck. In an electric BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) iX3 I am functional, the woman I never was. I own my own company, though I don’t know what it does. I am not fat, I am not weird and I am ‘good at men’, whatever that means. You might laugh at BMW for its solemnity and self-possession – for its very Germanness – but your laughter is hollow. Britain, increasingly a country of cracked and self-destructive romantics, has no such functional marque and has never sought one. We cleave to the flying bath (the Morgan) and the terrier (the Mini). We are all mad.
But no one can be mad in a BMW. It works too well: it must be, to eat up those lovely German autobahnen. It is less a car than a professional mercenary that you sit on. It’s called an SAV (Sports Activity Vehicle), but it looks like an SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle). Don’t ask me why they rebranded by amending the abbreviation. I do not know.
BMW has shaken itself up. The iX3 is the first in its Neue Klasse (New Class) range of EVs, designed to counter the China threat, which seems to evolve in every generation, Korea and also Tesla. Eventually there will be about 40 of them. It’s fine-looking if you prefer a CBeebies villain to a consumptive poet, and I do: high and imposing, with a tall and narrow grille. It has a tiny Bavarian flag on its nose and, within, it keeps the complex promise of the age if you have the funds to take it (it starts at £57,750): insularity in comfort.
In an electric BMW iX3 I am the woman I never was. I am not fat. I am not weird and I am ‘good at men’
The dashboard shows the temperature, the battery charge level and the charge on my iPhone, even when it isn’t plugged in. It has powerful acceleration because the battery is huge, and this matters to me: 0-62mph in 4.9 seconds, and a maximum speed of 130mph. And it does things to ease my path through life. It lights up for phantoms in the blind spot; brakes to keep a safe distance from the car in front; chides me when I stray from my lane or break the speed limit; plays music on my voice command; brushes my hair.
It promises 500 miles a charge to combat ‘range anxiety’, one of those terrible phrases journalists invent to subvert the Enlightenment and to keep themselves in work. I do not get ‘range anxiety’. It’s a car, fool, just pull over and charge it in one of Britain’s 122,724 charging points. (Though I don’t know how many of them work either.) Have you any idea how fortunate you are not to be travelling by miniature donkey? Even so, it is the first mass production car sold in the UK to make this promise: it will get you from Bude to East Kilbride on one charge. Maybe.
Newlyn is hell for parking. Fashionable fishing villages aren’t made for cars though, increasingly, they are made for bourgeois hard leftists dressed as milkmaids, who look absurd. But parking is still the thing we talk about most in Newlyn (people steal enforcement signs), followed by the time a swan was run over by the Co-op. Yesterday I watched a bus abandon its route because so many people had parked illegally for chicken in a basket at the Meadery.
Faced with this, I parked the iX3 in a bush above a small river. When pulling out I reversed over a small twig. The iX3 freaked out. It emitted a flurry of beeps – can cars scream? – and braked itself. Perhaps it thought the twig was a corpse. It can handle the Alps, I thought fondly, it can’t handle the twig, and that made me feel tender towards it. It was novella territory, with the iX3 as tragic hero. I overruled it, smashed the twig, and that was that. I missed it when it left, because it made strangers envy me. It made me envy myself.
The most interesting thing I have heard about a BMW is from my ex-husband on the old Series 8 – a hot, mean convertible that made me feel the same. ‘It doesn’t have a soul,’ I told him idly (I did not care, I loved it). ‘If the customer wanted a soul,’ he replied as if it were obvious, and it is, ‘BMW would build you one.’
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