[Josh (PA)]

This is very similar to the experience I had with the 5 series (530 x-drive) loaner I had last week when my x5 was in for an airbag recall.

I'd prefer to not own the 4 cylinder engine, but it was surprisingly responsive for a car of that size. It was also a lot smoother than in any of the other implementations that I tried.

The interior was very comfortable. The seats were standard excellent BMW shape and support. The most impressive piece of tech to me was the voice recognition. Basically you could have a conversation with the car and it would figure out exactly what you wanted. I have a friend with a pretty thick russian accent and he fumbled through asking the car to take him to an address (that he got half wrong) and it just figured it out. It took text dictation perfectly. The gesture thing was dumb and the depth of menus on the i-drive has gotten a bit overwhelming, but none of it mattered when you could just tell the car what to do.

I played with the dynamic cruise with the keep in your lane self driving. It was not confidence inspiring, but it was easy to disable. That's one of the thing I continue to appreciate in BMWs... the allowance to shut off nannies and do things like enter an address while driving, etc.

It drove well, felt like a nice solid old school 5 series. I was very surprised after the time I spent recently in the 2 series and f30 3 series and some other BMWs that lost their way. It is a well executed car.