A BMW iX3 50L xDrive prototype left Xining last week, climbed to nearly 4,000 meters above sea level, drove the full Qinghai Lake loop on public roads through snow, rain, and altitude sunshine, and came home 800 kilometers later with 2% battery left. The average consumption over the run was 12.6 kWh per 100 kilometers. BMW puts the implied range potential at 835 to 840 kilometers. According to BMW, the iX3 long wheelbase ran the whole road in Efficient mode.
The NA6 iX3 For China
The iX3 Long Wheelbase — sold in China as the iX3 50L xDrive and wearing Brilliance BMW badges — is the first long-wheelbase all-electric SAV on the Neue Klasse platform. The wheelbase stretches to 3,005 mm, up 108 mm from the standard iX3, with every millimeter of that going to rear-seat legroom. That puts it on a longer wheelbase than an X5, inside a body with the footprint of an X3. Cargo volume climbs to 1,900 liters with seats folded — 150 liters more than the standard iX3.
It is developed and produced at the BMW Brilliance Automotive joint venture in Shenyang. The car tested at Qinghai was still a pre-production prototype — it retains the older retractable door handles, which the production version will replace with traditional BMW-style handles similar to those on the i4 and i5.
The test car was also on 21-inch aerodynamic wheels. Not the smallest wheel option available, which makes the consumption figure slightly harder to achieve than it might look on paper.
The Efficiency Story
The sixth-generation high-voltage battery carries 108.7 kWh of usable energy in newly developed cylindrical cells. BMW’s in-house Energy Master unit manages distribution based on route profile, elevation, and conditions rather than state-of-charge alone. The drivetrain pairs an electrically excited synchronous motor with an asynchronous motor — BMW claims energy losses are down up to 40 percent versus the previous generation, with overall drivetrain efficiency up by as much as 20 percent.
BMW says the Heart of Joy control system enables energy recovery in up to 98 percent of everyday braking situations. On a road with nearly 2,000 meters of descent, that percentage is doing real work — every application of the brakes on the way back down from the plateau is either energy recovered or energy wasted.
The iX3 50L goes on sale in China in the second half of 2026. For everyone else, the standard-wheelbase NA5 iX3 is the Neue Klasse you can actually buy — and it shares most of the same architecture, the same battery generation, and the same drivetrain.
