When I received the BMW X1 Long-Wheelbase for review I did something I don’t normally do first, because my curiosity got the better of me. I pushed the driver’s seat well back to suit my own six-foot driving position, walked around and folded myself into the back seat behind it, and asked Anthony—who had come to deliver the car—to take me for a short drive.
During the virtual media briefing BMW had emphasized the extra room in this stretched version of its smallest SUV, and I wanted to see if this was true.
I had fully expected my knees to start arguing with the back of the seat within seconds. They never did. In fact, there was “no man’s air”—that crucial buffer zone—between my knees and the scooped-out seatback. I sat there for longer than was necessary, partly out of surprise, and partly because the seat itself, with its longer base and a couple of degrees of recline, is genuinely built for settling into with a sigh. It has that certain quality of your favourite armchair at the end of a long day—the one you sink into and simply let go, the day dissolving around you.
IT’S ALL IN THE BACK SEAT
That back seat is really the whole point of the X1 LWB, and everything else in the car has been quietly arranged around it. BMW has stretched the standard X1 by 116mm, with 108mm of that going straight into the wheelbase, and every millimetre has been spent on the same thing: making the back of the car feel like somewhere you’d choose to be.
The seat sits 27mm higher, the headrests are 37mm wider, and above it all is a big panoramic glass roof—nine square feet of it, fixed rather than opening—that floods the cabin with light and makes the interior feel larger. The boot has grown too, to a genuinely useful 540 litres, so the weekend duffels aren’t fighting the golf clubs for space.
There are touches that I really liked: the wireless charging pad up front holds the phone upright with a gentle clip, so it charges in place instead of sliding about every time you brake, the upholstery and finish feel premium, and the sound system is sweet. It’s a properly equipped car too, eight airbags as standard, a 360-degree camera, and a full suite of driver assistance systems, so the fuss BMW has made over comfort hasn’t come at the cost of the basics.
A CAR TO BE DRIVEN AROUND IN
All of it adds up to a car that feels built for a particular kind of Indian life, one where the back seat matters as much as the front. BMW already has a long-wheelbase 3 Series, a long-wheelbase 5 Series, and an electric iX1 LWB doing brisk business in India, and this year, more than half of BMW’s passenger vehicle sales have been long-wheelbase models. That statistic speaks about how this segment of buyer thinks.
A great many of them are driven through the working week by a chauffeur, navigating the special misery of the Indian city traffic, and then take the wheel themselves at the weekend for a drive out of town or an unhurried errand run. It’s a dual life that most car buyers elsewhere don’t really have to live, and it means one car is being asked to be two things—a proper limousine on a Tuesday morning, and a proper BMW on a Saturday. The X1 LWB is BMW’s answer to that specific Indian puzzle, pitched a rung below where this idea has previously lived, so that the limousine feeling doesn’t need a limousine budget to go with it.
BMW has even built the small logistics of that arrangement into the car itself, in the form of a digital key that lives on a phone or a smart watch in addition to the fob. It can be shared with up to four people, so the chauffeur can carry it through the week and hand nothing back on Saturday morning when the owner decides to drive themselves. It sounds like a minor convenience until you actually think about how many households this describes.
NOT A PERFORMANCE KING
Where this new X1 asks you to compromise is up front, behind the wheel. The engine is a 1.5-litre, three-cylinder turbo-petrol making 156hp and 230Nm, sent to the front wheels only through a 7-speed dual-clutch gearbox.
Pull away gently and you’d never guess it only has three cylinders. Ask more of it, though—say, a cheeky overtake—and there’s a beat of hesitation before the power arrives, followed by a thrum that isn’t quite the sound you expect from this badge.
BMW’s own figures have it doing 0-100kmph in 9.58 seconds, which is a number that will not trouble anyone’s pulse. I found myself, more than once, backing off and letting the car settle into its natural, unbothered pace rather than trying to hurry it along, which, in hindsight, is probably exactly how BMW expects most owners to drive it, or more likely, be driven in it.
There are a few omissions that made me frown a bit. The rear seat, for all its comfort, doesn’t get its own independently-controlled rear climate zone, so whoever’s back there is at the mercy of whatever temperature the front occupants have chosen—an odd thing to skimp on in a car built almost entirely around the rear-seat experience.
Up front, there’s no seat ventilation or massage function, both of which I’d expect at this price. While you do get a bunch of ADAS functions like pedestrian warning, auto emergency braking and lane departure warning and assist, adaptive cruise control is not present. The climate controls have also been folded into the touchscreen, so changing the AC temperature on the move means hunting through a menu rather than reaching for a dial or a button—a small irritation, but one most will run into often.
The same is the case with the function to memorize the driver’s seat position. There are no dedicated buttons for the same on the door. However, this can tie to your BMW ID or digital key profile.
None of these individually are dealbreakers, but stacked together, they’re the sort of small print worth knowing before you arrive at your BMW dealer with a coconut and a garland.
The X1 LWB was launched on 21 August at an introductory ex-showroom price of ₹49.9 lakh, undercutting most pre-launch estimates and putting real weight behind BMW’s pitch of limousine comfort without a limousine price tag. The Audi Q3 and Mercedes-Benz GLA don’t offer anything close in terms of rear-seat space, so BMW gets to have this particular conversation with buyers entirely on its own terms.
I drove the X1 LWB, and I enjoyed driving it well enough. But if I’m honest, the 15 minutes I spent in the back left the bigger impression, and going by BMW’s own sales figures, I suspect I’m in good company.
This isn’t a car built to thrill you from behind the wheel—it’s built to spoil you from behind someone else’s shoulder, and that is a job that it does rather well.
Rishad Saam Mehta is a Mumbai-based independent travel and automotive writer.