Grown-ups at Work

BMW's top-selling car takes the cautious route to its fourth generation

- Georg Kacher

WHILE WE HAVE BEEN focused on the big, mile-eating X5 and the compact XI, the man and woman in the street have stayed very firmly in the middle lane, buying 3.5 million X3 cars in the last 20 years. In 2023, it was BMW's best-selling car worldwide.

Those sales figures provide the answer to any questions you may have about why the changes in the fourth-generation newcomer are not as radical as some we have seen from BMW lately. All right, so this is a disguised pre-production prototype, but it does not take X-ray vision to tell that it is not disfigured by any grille weirdness.

Nothing radical, then, but there are plenty of changes, some of them rather pleasingly focused on enhancing driving pleasure. That is particularly so with one of the two versions we have driven, the new X3 M50, which replaces the M40.