BEIJING MOTOR SHOW: BMW stretches X1

Every car market has its quirks. Australia used to love big sedans, but it’s now switched it allegiance to SUVs, while America still likes its trucks and giant SUVs, and Europe still wants small diesel hatchbacks.

And Chinese buyers think, generally speaking, that there isn’t a car built today that couldn’t benefit by being stretched a bit, particularly between the axles.

While that’s not exactly fun for designers trying to balance proportions for different sizes of the same sausage, it was a task jumped at by Australian designer Calvin Luk, who designed the China-only long-wheelbase version of the X1 at the same time as he did the standard X1 five-door crossover, which launched late last year.

A quarter of the world’s sales of the original X1 ended up in China, so BMW has spent some engineering money loving up to the locals, and will build three long-wheelbase X1 variants at the BMW Brilliance plant in Shenyang, China.

While it’s officially not at liberty to say how much longer the long-wheelbase X1 is (Chinese law prohibits that level of detail being released until a car’s market introduction), we can tell you it’s 11cm longer overall, and all of that is given over to the rear-seat kneeroom.

The Chinese version of the car is now 4.56 metres long (instead of 4.45m) and remains 1.62 metres tall and 1.82 metres wide.

There’s a 40:20:40-split folding rear seat and all three pieces can slide back and forward by 13cm. Even in its farthest forward position, the rear seat’s occupants will have 5cm more knee room than the old car offered, or up to 18cm when the seats are back as far as they can go. And, obviously, they’ll have 11cm more than the rest of the world’s X1 rear-seat occupants get.

It will launch there officially on May 20, complete with the second generation X1’s purposeful look and a choice of three petrol motors. China isn’t a fan of diesel power for passenger cars, so there won’t be any turbo-diesel X1 LWBs.

The front-drive X1 sDrive 18Li starts it off with a 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbo-petrol engine, things rise to a 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol X1 20Li in either front-drive sDrive or all-wheel drive xDrive configurations, and the range tops out at the xDrive 25Li. The three-pot has 100kW, the 20Li has 141kW in either drive configuration and the range-topper boasts 170kW of power.