The 2027 BMW iX5 Is Quietly Building the Biggest Battery in the Room
Range anxiety is a younger EV’s problem. BMW has a different agenda.
The 2027 iX5 xDrive 60 arrives in the US with 144 kWh of usable battery capacity, the largest pack BMW has ever put into a production car.
To put that in perspective: the Lucid Gravity tops out at 123 kWh. The Rivian R1S Max pack is 140 kWh. The Porsche Cayenne Electric sits around 113 kWh. The iX5 out-batteries all of them, and BMW hasn’t even released official range figures yet.
They don’t need to. The iX3 and i3 sedan both clear 400 miles on a 112 kWh pack. Scale that up and the iX5 is pointing somewhere above 500 miles. The math does the talking.
There’s a catch. All that battery contributes to a curb weight of roughly 6,600 pounds, which puts the iX5 firmly in “small moon” territory. BMW’s answer: decoupled suspension springs, repositioned anti-roll bars, and a cell-to-pack battery design that strips out the module layers to save weight and floor height. They reportedly counted millimeters.
The iX5 doesn’t run on BMW’s shiny new Neue Klasse platform, but it borrows the sixth-gen cylindrical cells and 800-volt architecture from it. Think of it as a current-gen BMW wearing next-gen internals.
Final calibration drives are happening now at the Spartanburg plant. It’ll arrive alongside gas, diesel, plug-in hybrid, and hydrogen variants. But the one to watch is obvious.