Can A PHEV Be Efficient On The Highway? 2021 BMW X5 45e 70-MPH Highway MPG Test

hello and welcome to another out of spec reviews video welcome here to northern colorado welcome to the bmw x5 45e the new plug-in hybrid with quite a large battery pack and welcome to our 70 mile per hour highway mpg test i'm going to walk you through our procedures and i'm so interested to see the results here because plug-in hybrids get great fuel economy when there's energy in the battery but as you guys know when we test plug-in hybrid vehicles for mpg on the highway we always start with them completely out of electricity because if you're driving a long distance on the highway well you're not going to get much benefit out of the plug-in system so let's fuel up the x5 with our traditional fueling method and calculate the mpg on our 60 mile highway 70 mile per hour loop style test this is the 2021 bmw x5 45e it's really interesting the last generation bmw x5 i believe it was called the f-15 used the four-cylinder turbocharged engine the n20 engine paired with a pretty small battery pack so you didn't really have a good combustion engine and you really didn't have a good plug-in system and in my eyes it was a little bit of a flop now though bmw has beefed this thing up for the new model year here in the g series cars the new chassis for bmw where now we have the three liter inline six turbocharged engine that we know and love from cars like the m240i and now we're heading to charge this thing up i should say fill this thing up to the brim and uh with a battery completely dead see how well it does at 70 miles an hour you join me inside the x5 now and let's talk about some of how we're going to get everything set up if you take a look down here you'll see a ton of different modes so we have sport hybrid electric adaptive when you drive this car in hybrid mode or adaptive mode when you're cruising to your destination you will actually and what i should say is if you have a destination selected it does something really cool the car will prioritize um when to use electric and when to use combustion for example here in northern colorado we have a ton of highway about 60 miles of highway to get down to denver and then a lot of inner city driving if i was heading down there for a meeting or whatever i can put the car in automatic mode just hybrid or adaptive with my destination set the car will automatically prioritize electric to get to the highway combustion on the highway when that's working at its maximum efficiency and then electric in the city we actually have a whole video on this on the bmw x3 plug-in hybrid i'll link to it in the description but now let's start with our situation here i have the battery completely dead which is how we test all of our plug-in hybrids so ran it all the way down in electric mode then enough in hybrid mode to warm up the combustion engine so we're all up to temperature on oh i can just click one here i've programmed as a hotkey up to temperature so everything's the way it should be we're going to reset our individual distances there i'm going to go to our trip computer here make sure yep we're all reset i'm gonna start the car in hybrid eco pro so that's gonna be you know sort of how we run our tests the most eco-friendly mode uh with retaining climate control the car's off right now and we're pretty much good to go at this point so i'm going to start the car won't turn on because it's using that hybrid system so it is helping a little bit at this point no ancillary components on we're going to run 68 degrees to 72 degrees on automatic air conditioning in eco mode into drive and off we go on our test i'm really looking forward to seeing how this does plug in hybrids in theory shouldn't really help on the highway for mpg however oh we got a lot of fan going on here let's back this down one notch to auto 68 on low um the thing about this car is the way that the motor is positioned within the driveline is its combustion engine then electric motor then transmissions so the electric motor is upstream of the transmission which means it actually benefits from the shifting of gears and i found in my testing with other bmw plug-in systems using this similar drivetrain strategy is they're actually pretty uh efficient on the highway because the electric motor can help we actually haven't even kicked on the combustion yet and the batteries out so with any plug-in hybrid they'll always leave a little bit at the bottom of the battery pack where you can use to drive electric a bit just like a normal hybrid it's no different you just lose the plug-in benefits but we still haven't used any combustion but we're using about a thousand watt hour per mile one mile per kilowatt hour so not the most efficient on our electrical consumption there either our strategy here to merge up onto the highway as usual is a gentle acceleration where we hit 70 miles an hour at the end of the on-ramp when the on-ramp ends we want to hit 70 right there that way every car gets similar levels of acceleration and it also helps us keep it the engine out of boost a little bit combustion engines on now and it's pulling us forward so we're going to hit 70 once we're locked in at 70. as always we're going to gps verify bmws are the biggest defenders that lying to us about speed so we may have to do like 73 74 indicated uh and here we are almost at 70. i'm going to lock it in boom 70 indicated we're going to pull out the gps device and verify that's the case and then lane center our way up all the way to wyoming and then back here to colorado we're cruising along here at 72 miles an hour indicated that is a gps accurate 70 miles an hour you can see i have a heads-up display with some wonderful information as well bmw is great lane centering and we're using combustion engine but not very much of it i have to say you can barely tell when this thing is on and i'll also mention we'll have a whole video coming on the plug-in systems this whole video is on the combustion side we'll have a whole video coming on the electric side a highway any city range test as well but cruising along in combustion let me just show you it's using such a little amount of power that is barely even in boost just a few pounds of boost which is nothing so it's quiet it's comfortable and if you did want to drive on electric the one thing i do want to tell you is you can we actually go did about 85 87 miles an hour fully electric before the combustion engine even kicked on earlier when i was draining the battery pack so pretty impressive here in the bmw x5 45e a comfortable quiet cabin to be in with great driver assistance and very reasonably priced car in my opinion we'll go through some of the statistics at the end with some results and of course we'll see you at the turnaround point shortly well we are nearing exit 7 our turnaround point just about in one mile and i figured it'd be a cool opportunity to tell you a little bit about the x5 i'll have full driving reviews and stuff on my personal channel maybe even on this one i don't know exactly what we're going to do in the car but take a look at this it makes lane changes automatically on the driver assistant system has a capacitive steering wheel amazingly competent lane centering comfortable car too super quiet it's got double seals in the doors double glass really awesome well insulated car i'm just taking it off of cruise control now you can see we're approaching our exit up ahead we're going to get to uh gary's holding the camera what's it called a double diamond double diamond interchange yeah interchange you guys know the drill exit seven we basically can turn left without stopping as long as there's no cross traffic and the reason we chose this is of course to eliminate variables so we want to just keep the car rolling nice and consistently through here i think we should be good to go after this silver car now we're just good to go all together and so cruising through and then we're just going to gently again merge back up on the on-ramp we're going to try and hit 70 miles an hour by the time we hit the end of the ramp so let's carry some speed and momentum through here we're actually in electric mode now interestingly and now the combustion engine's on but it's so quiet it barely has to work pretty insane and uh interestingly i've noticed the x5 keeps about a reserve of one mile projected range uh let's add about five percent state of charge usable in the battery pack there so we need to maneuver around this truck get back up to 72 miles an hour we'll see if it's possible 68 69 70 172 and this guy's just about to get out of the way hopefully yeah that's an almost perfect situation right there on the on-ramp absolutely love it no arrow advantage i should mention weather by the way it's about between 47 and 53 degrees so i wouldn't really classify this as a cold weather fpg test but it's chilly and also we have some wind disadvantages so uh being uh basically a eastern wind we're heading into the crosswind right now and then our into the headwind then as we turn left to go back to colorado down i-25 we will have a side wind so the reason we run a loop style test uh as always is to counteract any wind or elevation differences but with a crosswind you kind of get hit both ways so i would say it's impressive if this car does well in its mpg testing i genuinely have no idea i haven't looked at the data yet uh if it can do well in this test with it's not a huge crossroad 10 miles an hour somewhat chilly well i think it pretty much only gets better from there unless you're driving in a monsoon bounce in and we are nearing the end of our highway mpg loop this is some of the most broken concrete pavement you know some of the harshest roads you can find in the country and this thing is doing a great job even on the big 21 inch wheels i believe they're 21 they might be 22s so now we're charging up the battery as i'm touching the brake pedal here uses a brake by wire blended system so it will recharge the battery and then once the battery can't accept you know that much power it will switch to friction brakes pulling in behind the two series which will be another video on this same channel mpg loop we're running them at the same time always fun at what point will it shut off the combustion engine let's see it might actually be off now i don't think it is coming into a stop and yeah i think it's actually still running maybe not i don't know uh some traffic coming this way we're going to run over to the come and go as we always do yep combustion engine didn't want to shut off there uh when you run in eco pro mode bmw always runs a little bit warmer on the temperature for oil and coolant well i think they use the same oil and coolant separator just for a little bit better efficiency if you have your combustion chamber naturally hot you use less fuel obviously and up here at altitude i actually need less fuel because there's less air it's really kind of cheat code style if you will minor minor differences though this is still a very relevant test moving here over into the fueling station just creeping our way in we're in hybrid eco pro mode we're going to try not to crash into the ram towing a u-haul don't know why they didn't just use their pickup bed and normally i like to use the same pump where we were so i think i'll back it into this pump and we'll compare the results of the pump efficiency versus the mpg here on the screen and let's take a look at the results here in the car and then we'll compare them to the pump the car says we traveled an average of 68 1868.1 miles per hour it's a 57 and a half mile loop sometimes it's a little bit accurate bit inaccurate in the bmw stuff but gps accurate 57.5 26.3 mpg about a half a mile fully electric of those electric miles that's not correct 20 miles per kilowatt hour so that must be it's mostly using combustion not electric because that factors your entire drive um but yeah so 26.3 doesn't seem great let's check the pump efficiency all right time to put in the gas jordan what are you doing in this video we haven't seen you yet you were actually just doing the m240i continuity am i right yeah so we're gonna go same situation full on the handle complete we're then going to compare the pump results with the pump or the uh trip computer inside the eye drive system here in the car the i-drive systems are always a little bit off and so is the pump a little bit off because sometimes we don't get the exact same fuel sometimes the speedometer is off like this car so we average it out to get a good idea 1.9 gallon seems uh okay it's a big car but we'll see how it handles the second the second click here 30 seconds is gone full squeeze on the handle and the results are 2.146 oh yeah yeah let's calculate well guys it's always a little bit of a difficult task to figure out how to properly test mpg on plug-in hybrid vehicles just mostly because there's so many sub-systems going on and different ways to power the vehicle in this case i think we got it correct we just start with the battery dead that's where you're going to spend most of your time on the highway we then charged it i should say left it empty got people beeping going down the streets over here but let's get to the results so the in-car i-drive system what did it say gary v8 car 26.3 26.3 mpg and the pump said 26.7 26.7 so about 26 and a half mpg at a 70 mile per hour constant loop style test minimal wind a little bit of crosswind here in the x5 x545e of course the end sport package with the big wheels really didn't help much at all but i gotta say that's okay i'm not blown away this car is really amazing in so many categories but i'm not quite sure if fuel economy is one of those on the highway now when you combine the electric driving with the combustion driving well that's when you're going to get the best results of a plug-in and this kind of speaks to my thinking of plugins once your battery's dead then you're just hauling around all that extra weight and complexity with zero benefits so i think if you spend most of your time in urban environments the plug-in is the way to go without it i'd be curious to run a non-plug-in x5 35i or 40i i guess they call it now and see how that does in comparison thanks so much for watching another out of spec reviews video we'll see you on the next one bye-bye you

Channel: Out of Spec Reviews

Views: 57,521

Keywords: Car, Review, Acceleration, Braking, POV, Handling, Test, VS, Comparison, Interior, Exterior, Supercar, Hypercar, Sedan, SUV, CUV, TFL, Redline Reviews, Motor1, sports car

Id: W40xhHwoxhA

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022