Excellent to drive, excellent space, seats, handling and automatic gear box. Really a great all purpose car; the twin turbo diesel is a joy to drive & fast enough. Drive carefully and you'll get 40 mpg, drive normally and you'll get 35mpg. Happily I never believed the typical inflated marketing about the fuel economy from BMW and am not disappointed.

What's really really good:
- Driving / performance / automatic gearbox
- Automatic air-recirculation - stunningly simple and effective

What's Bad:
- Terrible boot plastics - really really cheap & nasty - why make such a great car so cheap? Dear BMW: you notice it every single day you put stuff in the boot, it's not hidden, it's not nice, and it's noticeable... a few friends have cars from Audi and they laugh at it.. such as shame as the rest of the car is better and yet silly nothing items like this stick in their heads
- Under floor boot space for a car with run flat tyres is really poor
- seats don't fold flat
- standard plastic trim is terrible: I STRONGLY suggest the aluminium internal trim - really great, versus really bad plastic option.
- Green LED light on the automatic gear stick is too bright & irritates in the dark as soon as you move your arm
- Automatic windscreen wipers are the WORST / most USELESS I've ever met. Totally irritated having to over ride it all the time... why oh why can't they have a simple, variable intermittent setting. Seriously this a reason NOT to buy this car!
- Very low speed ride quality... how to say: Ride quality on this car is great, yet on a very slow speed bump that you don't take square on the suspension is too firm and you end up shaking everyone to death violently.. I know it's a SUV and this is the normal downside BUT why can't the suspension get a little softer < 10mph??? It get's harder in sport mode (great), normal setting for normal driving is great, but a very slow speed bump... to be avoided.
- Stereo / MP3: If you have MP3s on the internal hard disk (if you manage to get MP3 on the hard disk without the help of the BMW garage that is) OR on a memory stick then you can only skip through the songs on the random setting from the central console, not the steering wheel >> details like this turn a great car into an irritating car.

Reliability issues after 3.5 months & 6'000 miles:
- windscreen wipers rubber was too hard & needed to be replaced.. it shuddered and was noisy & didn't clean the screen from day 1
- terrible wind noise from the doors: BMW garage has take off 2 of the 4 doors, replaced the rubber seals and re-hanged the doors >> MASSIVE improvement & reduction in wind noise. BMW garage response is great: "You notice that this car is now built in USA & not Austria" @ all X3 F25 drivers who notice the wind noise - your dealer can fix it!
- Steering rack was grating/noisy and the rubber seals needed replacing (twice)
- Start/stop system: 20% of the time you stop the car at the traffic lights, the engine stops and then starts immediately along with all the warning lights (no brakes, no 4X4, no air in the tyres etc.) that then remain on until the motor is switched off and restarted. It's now been "fixed" 3 times by the BMW garage. Picked it up last week from the latest fix, drove 20 mins from the garage, stopped at the lights and it failed again.

What can I say... Great car, some poor quality issues and more importantly some really irritating bits; SERIOUSLY irritating bits, that would be so easily resolved if they had normal people involved in the development (music skipping, windscreen wipers etc.) of the car.

J.