On the one hand, the brakes have great feel and a firm pedal, giving real confidence whenever you use them. Exactly what you’d hope for in a BMW; nothing out of the ordinary there.

On the other, BMW has employed clever regen tech so that not only is 98 per cent of the braking done solely with regen, but it’s also so smooth as you come to a full stop that any driver could give the world’s greatest chauffeur a run for their money. It makes the car feel incredibly refined.

There is zero head-toss as I glide to a halt. In fact, since we are on a test track, I also try the exercise with my eyes shut and can’t tell whether we are still moving or not.

This sounds like an unusual thing to get excited about. But it illustrates the many, many small gains BMW has made in creating the new iX3 – gains that add up to more than the sum of the parts.

It’s the first car from the Neue Klasse project that overhauls everything ahead of the 2030s. BMW has picked apart every single aspect of its cars in order to reach this point. It could have left the brakes alone and nobody would have complained – but it could improve them, so it did.

Back in August 2020, BMW realised the electric world was moving at at a much faster pace than the Munich-based giant could keep up with. An entirely new way of thinking was needed, one that could redefine BMW’s cars for the next decade or more. That’s why it’s dubbed the project Neue Klasse, after the revolutionary sports saloon of 1961.

Risky? Yes. The stakes are very high. The iX3 is the electric version of a model that sold 50,000 last year, in a highly competitive market – if it’s anything less than excellent, buyers will go elsewhere. And the next model to get the Neue Klasse treatment will be 2026’s 3-series – the car that for many defines BMW. So – gulp – it had better be good.

The free thinking extends way beyond the brakes. It includes a more vertical integration of the supply chain (like BYD and Ferrari, BMW aims to control a lot of what goes into its cars), new hardware such as the battery pack, and new software: a fresh operating system dubbed OS10.

It’s all underpinned by something that BMW in its wisdom has given the most cringe-inducing name: the Heart of Joy. This computer control system provides the platform everything else is built upon. Essentially, what BMW has done is condense the various control systems into four ‘superbrains’ that oversee the vehicle dynamics, the infotainment, the driver assistance and support functions such as climate control, and it’s carefully co-ordinated them all.

This simplified system can react quicker (up to 10 times faster, in fact). This isn’t a new thought process – Rivian has a similar set-up and Volkswagen will be using it on the ID. 1 – but the execution in the iX3 is impressive.

Take the chassis control. Because the Heart of Joy – we really need to think of a new name for it – reacts so quickly, the car can be both interesting and also predictable. At one point we try it on a wet handling track and there is a little bit of slip, enough to feel interesting but not so much to feel wild. There’s no sudden lurch, thanks to the traction control reacting so smoothly.

On a dry handling circuit, the brakes and steering can trim your line easily but if you really lean on the car you can feel the power at the rear wheels more in play. The steering is precise and in Sport mode has a smidge of feel – more than you get in most electric SUVs.

No part of the car feels wildly out of synch with another. There’s a harmony to it, a greater sense of maturity than you’d expect from a prototype, especially such a groundbreaking one.

Not every recent BMW has provided the best ride quality, but this seems fine. Using conventional steel springs and passive dampers, it’s definitely on the firm side but is also extremely well damped. I hit a series of speed bumps at 30mph and the iX3 soaks up the impacts and settles down well. It’s running a two-piston set-up that gives a bit more scope at the extremities of the damper travel – again, not revolutionary – but the way they’ve been tuned is incredible. Would a series of short, sharp lumps upset it? Possibly, but it feels better controlled than an M5.

Crucially, the driver assistance doesn’t get in the way of driving, at least as far as I can tell from a drive on a test track; a narrow British B-road might be a different matter.

BMW has categorised its assistance under three headings: safe, smart (thanks to AI) and symbiotic. Take the lane-keep assist. Safe: if you drift out of your lane, the car will correct the steering. Symbiotic: if you steer out of your lane but don’t indicate, the car will let you do it but will give a slight nudge reminder as you cross the white line, just in case you’re making a mistake. Smart: if you actively change lanes and glance in the side mirror as you do so, there’s no resistance. The car knows you’ve checked your blind spot and that you’re not an idiot.

It’s a breath of fresh air: assistance systems that aren’t so annoying that you want to turn them off. Mostly, anyway; the speed bongs need manually deactivating every time you start the car.

None of this would be possible without the software changes that BMW has made. Often when a car maker starts calling itself a technology company and emphasising software over driving dynamics it’s time to start looking elsewhere, but it feels different here.

Changes to the hardware have helped. Because the battery is now arranged in a ‘cell-to-pack’ format, rather than divided into modules, it uses space more efficiently and increases torsional rigidity. Not that BMW is the first to do this – BYD’s Blade battery has been doing it for a while.

BMW’s batteries are now cylindrically arranged, rather than prismatically, which aids cooling and increases volumetric energy by 20 per cent. The inverter uses silicone carbide, helping boost efficiency.

BMW isn’t revealing many facts and figures just yet, but it’s claiming a range of nearly 500 miles from this all-wheel-drive version; a rear-drive iX3 will follow. We got an efficiency figure of 3.7 miler per kWh on our short test route.

The car uses 800-volt architecture, so if you can find a suitably powerful charger it can add 215 miles of range in just 10 minutes. It should also be able to make better use of other chargers, by sustaining a flatter 150kW charge curve for longer. And it’s a two-way street: the iX3 will also offer vehicle-to-load, vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid charging, using the car to power other parts of your life.

As this is a prototype car, I can’t tell you what the interior build quality feels like. But the controversial new Panoramic Vision cockpit is in full working order. Whereas BMW’s first iDrive interface, back in 2001, took a lot of getting used to, this feels right from the get-go. Housed at the base of the windscreen and running from pillar to pillar, it displays basic drive information like speed and remaining range along with a set of six customisable tiles that can show anything from BMW’s voice-control assistant to your estimated time of arrival.

It’s all operated by voice control and the haptic buttons on the steering wheel. My scepticism is soon overcome but just how well it works. I never find I’m overloaded with information, nor do I struggle to find where to look – your eyes flit between all the elements naturally. I certainly don’t miss the traditional dash. The car still has a big touchscreen and a head-up display, though.

It also illustrates a wider point about the iX3. I expected it to be controversial and was hoping for some sort of eureka moment that transported me to a new, nirvana-like state of EV happiness. Wrong on both counts: no controversy and no eureka moment. And that’s perhaps the greatest skill of the car – it feels just like a car. No readjustment, no brain frying. The Neue Klasse philosophy should work across a broad spectrum, giving hope for the 3-series and M3. BMW hasn’t so much reinvented the wheel as created a better wheel.