These photos are excellent – and should help folks make a decision about wheel choice.
You see, on the X 5, when you select the large / sport wheel option, the rears are wider than the fronts. This means you can no longer rotate your tires front to back, and you also get tires which are not all-season tread type. But on the X5, with the sport wheels, BMW is forced to add a wide plastic trim piece around the rear wheel cutout – this is because the body does not stick out far enough to cover the wider rear tires. On the X 5, I think this looks strange (a bit of an after-thought). Mercedes also does this with the plastic body kits for their AMG cars…
But from these pictures, we can clearly see that the X6 is TOTALLY designed to use staggered (wider in the back) tires and wheels. This car (picture at the top of the post) is shown with the standard wheels (common front to back), and the rears look pathetically small in the cutouts. Yet in the later picture of the official ‘released’ car at the Detroit car show, you can see the staggered wheels, and the wider rears look much better matched to the sheet metal. The sheet metal is clearly designed to accommodate the wider rear tires (with no need for the extension plastic piece as used by the X 5).
I personally was tending to the standard wheels, but after seeing these (well angled) photos, I think I would regret NOT getting the wider wheels in the rear – it really looks bad; almost as if you have temporary spar tires on the rear!!!
The ‘Visualizer’ feature on the international site (
www.bmw.com / x6 / visualizer tab) shows all available wheel choices. There is a staggered option for 19” wheels (9/10Jx19”), and two staggered 20” options (10/11Jx20”). There are two wheel options with 19” common wheels front to back (9Jx19”). I would like to get all season tires, given the amount of rain / snow I see each year… but my dealer told me that 20” wheels on the X5 do not come in all-season tread. My hope will be that with the 19” staggered wheels, you can still get all-season rubber. Otherwise, I guess I’ll get my personal favorite, the AWESOME Y-Spoke 20” staggered set, and then consider a second set of wheels-&-tires for winter driving?...!
What you see here is the difference in a 9x19” wheel and a 11x20” wheel in the rear cutout. TWO inches in width makes a very big visual difference!
Thanks for the post horatiub – for me, this is a very informative finding that will certainly impact how I order MY X6 in the coming weeks!
Cheers,