>>[background music] It's one of the odder vehicles on the market, the BMW X6, a sort of coupe UV, perhaps more a fashion than automotive purchase. Ours makes up in brawn what it might lack in common sense, that's because it's an M. Let's see where all of this fits and check the temp. Our X6M is finished in Melbourne red with black merino leather, which does nothing to lesson the amount that it says, look at me. And all X6's present tall and massive in person, even though they're just two row vehicles. Now where the X6 is an odd bird, the cabin is pretty familiar stuff. This is that electro mechanical shifter that you get on the current BMW's where everything is basically drive by wire. And of course I've got the M logo here because we do have a more sport mode that we'll get to in a minute, very more sport mode. And your i-drive controller is pretty garden variety stuff at this point, we've seen this in a number of BMW's and luckily it sprouts a whole lot of dedicated shortcut buttons that original i-drive didn't have. So digging through menus, you do less of it now to get where you gotta go. The audio system on our car is the basic audio system, which is pretty elaborate, for a car of this price it ought to be. There's also premium sound. We've also got music collection, that's a hard drive based system. Auxiliary up here in front, standard aux jack but there's no USB on this car because without premium sound you don't get that. And then of course we've also got your tone controls right here, pretty basic stuff. You've got full surround. Beyond that, you know more or less basic tone controls, although BMW does let you dig down to a nice EQ panel. I like that. Now you've got to get optional technology to get that. The rearview camera, that's not standard on an X6. That's just stingy, especially a car like this that has limited, that's not quite fair, no rear visibility. You do have a pretty elaborate system back here. [background beeping noise] You see I've got trajectory aiming. And notice those yellow and red squares there. Those are modeling, not just the proximity but also the curvature of that car behind me for example so it really gives you some interesting indication of what the shape of the obstruction is. And our vehicle also has the perimeter view because of additional cameras because of the driver assistance package. So you can kind of see all the way around bird's eye style, what's around your vehicle where you can't look down with your own eyes. Bluetooth hands on free is stock on an X6, as you might expect but in no point is Bluetooth A2DP stereo streaming even available. Now of course we're driving an X6M so let's get right down to it, the M button here on the wheel takes us to the M dynamic mode, which changes everything on the vehicle or very little, depending on what you do. Let's go to the screen. If I go down to the settings here I get my M drive, I open that up and now I can decide what M dynamic mode really makes happen. I can go to normal, sport or just not make a change in terms of the EDC, the dynamics control. My stability control I can turn off for some wheel spinning fun, this guy's all wheel drive by the way so you can spin all four wheels and of course the all important power ramping. When you have 550 horsepower under foot you tend to want to have less of it in daily driving. It just gets a little intractable. But you can get into efficient or sport mode right here and make that part of the M profile. I don't know when you'd ever want M mode to be efficient power delivery but if you want it you can do that. And you can also change what the head up display shows, either the basic stuff or the M view, which is more of this sort of power band display, shows you more of how you're using the engines power and your current speed but that does tend to get overwritten by navigation prompts. Now a big part of your $89,000 base price lives under here, 4.4 liter V8. Twin turbos, one for each bank. Direct injection, that's that clattering noise you hear but only when the hoods up. Five hundred and fifty five horsepower, hello. Five hundred foot pounds of torque. Zero to 60 is like a four and a half second affair and the mileage is a disaster, 1217. Oh no, that's not a disaster. The pollution numbers are. It gets a miserable 4 and 2 on the smog and CO2 scales. [background music] The X6M has all kinds of power but I found it a little hard to get to without really hammering this thing. A standard drive mode on the gear box is just tubby as it desperately seeks whatever MPG it can eek out. Sport mode was too high strung for routine driving with a little nerve and M mode, well that's a commitment. The X6M is planted like a tree but it still feels tall when pushed on serpentine roads. Overall I found it odd that a $90,000 BMW made me recall fondly of $50,000 Lincoln MKT, under pretty much all except sporting conditions. Okay let's price this big and somewhat questionable vehicle about $90,000 of destination. On top of that, about $3,000 a year in gas is the EPA. That's another story. Now you're gonna want to add in the premium sound package if you want the six disc changer with the USB iPod connection, $1400 for that with the enhanced sound also thrown in. Then you've gotta look at what's called the driver assistance package. That's gonna bring you the head of display and the rearview camera with the around view cameras as well. Pretty good deal at $1800 considering the hud is $1300 alone if you get it A la carte so go for that package.
