Review: 2024 BMW X5 xDrive40i

I still remember when BMW unveiled its iDrive infotainment system. Instead of hard buttons for all functions, the new-for-2002 7-series buried many of them in layers of on-screen submenus only its designer could find intuitive, and the system was panned by everyone as a result.

The pleasant surprise in all this was that BMW didn't pull a Steve Jobs "you're holding it wrong", and actually listened to all the negative feedback. Later iterations of the system became the best in the business, making screened functions easy to find, while all the basics retained the hard buttons they used to have.

Fast forward to today: we have the system's eighth iteration fitted to almost all new BMW's, and it's 2002 all over again. Instead of further refining what worked, they went kamikaze and took out almost all of the remaining buttons, leaving us with a giant smartphone on the dash.

With things again being buried and hard to access, the system is quite literally a high-resolution user experience regression. It's as if they made the industry's best infotainment by fluke.