BMS Stage 1 F86 X6M

[thomaszas]

Hello all, I recently bought a new (to me) 2017 f86 x6m a few months back as a belated birthday gift to myself 😅. I came from an e90 m3 (and a lot of built Subarus), but I needed a bigger car as my family is about to grow and was in search for the best SUV/crossover I can find for ~60k, and found an incredible deal on this mineral white on red loaded x6m with 29k miles on the dash. As a quick review of this car I just gotta say, this car checks more boxes than anything I've ever owned in terms of comfort, power, handling, luxury, this car has it all. The one thing I would criticize is the weight of the car, more specifically the power-to-weight. This car feels every bit of 600hp (567, 575, whatever it is), but it also feels every bit of 6000lbs as well, so I wasn't necessarily "over the moon" impressed with straight line acceleration, it was definitely quick but when you think 600hp, you think fast, and I could tell without the SUV weight it would move more like the M5.

Now obviously I'm not planning on doing any weight reduction on my new dad-mobile, and frankly I don't want to get overly invested in power mods, downpipes, intakes, custom tunes, etc. I've been there before with my heavily modified WRX, and it was incredibly fun to build the car, but when it's comes to modifying cars there is a point of diminishing returns to driveability and reliability, at a certain point it makes more (financial) sense to just sell the car and get something faster if it's not enough, so it's safe to say those days are over for me. After putting on about 5k miles, I said I'm going to do a stage 1 and I'm certain it should give me the super SUV power I was looking for.

So, after some research on the most popular stage 1 tunes I settled on BMS stage 1. I didn't bother with the JB4 as I don't plan on adding any more power mods than this. The price was the best of all it's competitors (by far, less than half the price), and honestly after my research, I trusted their product to do what it claimed more than the competition. Some companies seem to advertise very inflated HP gains with next to no figures/graphs/plots to back their claims. BMS had transparent before and after dynos with realistic figures. I don't expect a simple chip to give me as much HP as a custom tune, like many advertise that their chips do.

Now if you've stuck around long enough through my ridiculously long review/autobiography 😅 I can honestly say that this incredibly easy to install chip was well worth the money, it absolutely woke this beast up. After just a handful of runs (without launch control, just quick 2500-3000rpm and dump) the car ran 0-60 in 3.6 and 1/4 mile in 11.7 (and I had to let off the throttle just before the end of the 1/4 mile run as I was running out of road) otherwise it surely would have dipped somewhere in the 11.6X range. Honestly my goal was the get into the same ballpark performance of the new f95/f96, and this chip did just that. I'm looking forward to see what a proper run with launch control will result, I'm thinking it can dip into 3.5X and 11.5x-11.6 range with launch control and perfect traction.

When I was doing my research it was hard to find any info/videos on power gains and improved times, so I attached the dragy runs (and a pic of my new toy) in case anyone is interested.

Tom

[sly1types]

Nice to see the data, i have stg 1 93 BM3 tune also, works well and little quicker.

[Franktea1$]

Ive been thinking about adding this for sometime.

[x5mMege]

I also have the BMS stage 1, plug and play no issues. Warranty over soon and will switch to BM3 for an Ethanol tune