BMW X Models Pricing and Specs

The biggest determining factor in how a car copes with tougher terrain is driver behaviour. Drive the car sensibly, sympathetically and to the conditions and you'll be amazed where most cars will happily take you. But get it wrong and drive in a ham-fisted way, and even the roughest, toughest four-wheel-drive will suffer and fail.

The BMW X5 is a soft-roader at best, but should definitely have the suspension to tackle rough roads (as opposed to off-road). The biggest challenge will be the tyres fitted. Many of these vehicles had huge wheels with tyres with very little sidewall. These tyres are easily damaged on rough roads.

Since luggage space is not a critical issue for you, I'd suggest buying a full-sized spare tyre that fits the car, as the SUV's usual space-saver or tyre repair kit can be fairly useless in such conditions. But you also need to be honest about your intentions. By mud and water, do you mean the odd puddle, or 10km of rutted farm track with bog-holes for good measure? If there's any off-road work at all, then you need an off-road four-wheel-drive, not an SUV.

You’d think this would be a fairly simple question to answer, but in reality, it’s far from it. It seems neither BMW nor Porsche offer what we know as fixed or capped price servicing, that is; a known price that the service will cost, paid when you need to have it carried out. This is not uncommon with prestige brands and reflects the changing costs of imported service parts as well as different marketing approaches.

BMW, however, comes closest to this concept with what it calls its Service Inclusive Basic Plan which requires the car’s buyer to pay up front, typically for the first five years, of servicing when the car is purchased. That sounds odd, but it makes sense to buyers leasing their cars as the service costs are then paid for as part of the financing package.

In the case of the BMW X4, this package, which covers consumables such as filters, oil, spark plugs and brake fluid (but not clutches, brake pads and windscreen wipers; that’s another step up to the Service Inclusive Plus Plan) lasts for five years or 80,000km (whichever comes first) and works out to an average of $350 per service or a total of $1750 over the plan’s duration. Fundamentally, it’s like other car-makers’ capped-price servicing but you pay up front for it.

Meanwhile, at Porsche, the servicing costs for a Macan over the same 80,000km/five-year period will depend on what state you live in as labour rates vary from state to state. Since you’re from NSW, I’ll use the data from that state. As such, the Macan will need an annual service at one-year/15,000km costing $695. The next service at two years/30,000km is an intermediate service at $995, followed by another annual service at three years/45,000km ($695 again). The four-year/60,000km service is a major one costing $1750, followed by the five- year/75,000km service at $695 to end with. In total, that’s a grand total of $4830, making the Porsche by far the most expensive car to service for those first five years.

With the Germans in particular hungry to mine every single niche – fanned by the flames of electrification and a hunger by the ever-growing number of global billionaires for the biggest and best – an 'uber, uber SUV' above the X7 will probably happen.

BMW is saying nothing of course, and we're only speculating here, but if it ever happens, it would almost certainly be electric or electrified, and may spawn a Rolls-Royce offshoot, since BMW owns that English brand.

So, nothing for now, but don't bet against an X8 or even X9. They're likely inevitable given enough time.