2011 BMW X3 - Review

By Marty Padgett

Marty Padgett

Editorial Director BIO

Marty Padgett is High Gear Media's Editorial Director, overseeing the words that skim across High Gear Media's portfolio of automotive destinations... More

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2011 BMW X3

Attention, Glenn Beck and the rest of right-tilting America: this is the new, camera-ready face of legal immigration.

The 2011 BMW X3 is a newly minted citizen, and clearly, it went overboard studying for its naturalization exams. How else would it know offhand, the easy path to success blazed by other tailored-for-America products?

If you missed it in civics or marketing class, cheat off our paper. Make it bigger, make it faster, make it richer--but don't make it too off-roady.

The new X3 ticks all those boxes, from its un-knobby tires to its gently curved roof. It's grown in almost every dimension, and gained a great new interior with more second-row seat room. (It's almost the size of the original X5, now.) It looks fantastic, inside and out. It's fast enough to blur any memory of its stiff-riding, cheap-cabin ancestors. It has all the hallmarks of a big U.S. splash, down to the patriotic tug on the heartstrings, now that it's assembled in South Carolina, alongside the X5 and X6 sport-utes.

But in its new incarnation as something more than a compact luxury crossover, with something more than casual off-road capability, is the X3 a real pole-vault ahead of a crowded class overstuffed with the Cadillac SRX, Audi Q5, Volvo XC60 and a slew of other multi-mission utes? Does it hit the luxury-crossover hot button more quickly, and accurately?

We set off to rural Georgia to deep-dive into the latest BMW blend for those answers, and some outstanding pecan pie niblets that strayed into their demise. An elaborate pavilion pinned down in strong winds by a wide range of BMW four-wheel-drive vehicles drove the off-road point home before we even laid hands on keyfobs--yes, the X3 still can stray off pavement. So did the handy farm trails carved into hundreds of surrounding acres.