Our BMW X3 Has a Great Touchscreen But Frustrating Menus

• What's new: The 2025 BMW X3 has a big touchscreen, digital instrument cluster and lots of driver aids.
• Why it matters: Some of this is pure tech and menu overload, but other features work well.
• Edmunds says: Overall, our X3's tech seems to be a mixed bag.

Will Kaufman, manager of video, concurs: "In a BMW lacking any inherent charm, all the little annoyances start to stand out even more. The infotainment system and menu structures are sitting right up near the top of that list. The system has basically an app drawer where all the different apps and a dozen different settings menus are just tossed together in no apparent order."

"Finding what you want is a nightmare, as I found myself reading a dozen tiny labels, guessing which one led to the setting I wanted, getting it wrong, and having to start over. Also, you go from a menu with a bunch of individually labeled options into individual settings apps with nested menus where it's not always clear what gives you access to a nested menu and what doesn't, and what settings are in each menu. It's as bad as anything Volvo has ever inflicted on us."

The menu system offers a steep learning curve, but how's the screen?

Not bad, actually! Every X3 comes with a 14.9-inch touchscreen along with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. You also get a standard wireless charging pad, which works pretty well. 

"I hate the menus in the BMW's infotainment, but I love the screens," said Kaufman. "They're big but not overwhelmingly big. Enough that you get plenty of real estate for your map, podcast/music app, and any third thing you want to mess with. They're also super crisp and really snappy when you're tapping or scrolling."

Consumer advice manager Ron Montoya is also a fan of the central touchscreen but is less charmed by the gauge cluster screen.

"I'm a bit torn about the interior design of our BMW X3. On the one hand, the dual screens merging into a single curved glass look impressive and futuristic, but on the other hand, it's part of a growing trend of automakers slapping on a couple of screens on a dashboard and calling it a day," said Montoya.

"Now, to be clear, I don't mind a nice big screen for the center infotainment. I'm nitpicking the screen used in place of the gauge cluster. If you'd have asked me 20 years ago if I thought that would be a cool feature, I'd be all over it. But as I've been in many modern cars, I find myself longing for the days of analog gauges; a time when there could be variations within the same brand, and there was more of a three-dimensional feel to the interior rather than flat 2D screens."

Driver assists get a big thumbs-up

"I forgot how good the driver assists are in this vehicle," said Duncan Brady, script writer. "Ours has the $3,400 Premium package, which, among other things (panoramic roof, head-up display, 360-degree camera system, remote start, heated steering wheel), adds Driving Assistant Plus. This is basically just BMW's adaptive cruise control and lane centering, but it's really well done.

"The systems are good at maintaining a following gap pretty naturally and staying confidently centered in the lane. It'll follow most curves in the highway, too. And maybe my favorite bit is that the well-tuned capacitive sensor in the steering wheel means not once in my week of highway driving did the car tell me to put my hands on the wheel when they were already there, a frequent annoyance in cars with these systems. Thanks, BMW."

However, Brady was less impressed by the Parking Assistant Professional feature. 

"I used BMW's park assist feature to reverse into my garage parking space hands-free," said Brady. "It worked ... poorly. The car wasn't centered in the space, wasn't straight, and was parked so close to the car next to me that I could barely get out. I had also used it successfully to parallel park on a quiet street, but the system isn't consistent or reliable enough for me to actually use."

The 2025 BMW X3 is a mixed bag on the tech front. We like the screen and its integration of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. But any time you need to navigate away from the friendly confines of Apple Land, you're sure to be met with some frustration. 

Thankfully, that's a learning curve you should eventually master if you own the vehicle. And as we noted, the driver aids work pretty darn well. So, it's not perfect but this is a case where the good outweighs the bad.