An eye for an iX3

Singapore

AS HAPPENSTANCE would have it, I saw a new BMW iX3 zip by on the road about an hour before settling down to write this, with a decal bearing the motto of a certain Anglo-Chinese institution on it. "The best is yet to be", it read (although what it really meant to say was, "My kid goes to ACS").

Maybe that school slogan gives some insight into the mindset of someone willing to make a clean break from petrol, but it's also an apt view of the market for battery-powered cars, which is starting to go supernova. The electric car population here more than doubled to around 2,900 last year, and I'd put money down on it doubling again in 2022. Whatever you think of electric cars, there are 45,000 reasons to consider the BMW iX3. That's the cumulative number of dollars you can keep from the tax man's grubby hands if you buy one, S$25,000 of which is from a low emissions rebate (after accounting for electricity generation, the iX3 is still cleaner than most cars) and another S$20,000 is because it runs on batteries, which are expensive but have been deemed worthy of incentivising.