The iX’s pre-crash front seatbelts will tighten automatically in the event the vehicle detects an impending crash, improving protection against injury significantly. The Macan doesn’t offer pre-crash pretensioners.
Both the iX and Macan have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The iX has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Macan’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
The iX’s standard pretensioning seatbelts also sense rear collisions and remove slack from the front seatbelts to help protect the occupants from whiplash and other injuries. The Macan doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
Over 200 people are killed each year when backed over by motor vehicles. The iX has standard Active Park Distance Control that uses rear sensors to monitor and automatically apply the brakes to prevent a rear collision. The Macan doesn’t offer backup collision prevention brakes.
The iX has a standard blind spot warning system which uses sensors to alert the driver to objects in the vehicle’s blind spots where the side view mirrors don’t reveal them and moves the vehicle back into its lane. A system to reveal vehicles in the Macan’s blind spot costs extra.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the iX’s standard rear cross-path warning system uses sensors in the rear bumper to alert the driver to vehicles approaching from the side, helping the driver avoid collisions. The Macan doesn’t offer a cross-path warning system.
The iX’s driver alert monitor detects an inattentive driver then sounds a warning and suggests a break. According to the NHTSA, drivers who fall asleep cause about 100,000 crashes and 1500 deaths a year. The Macan doesn’t offer a driver alert monitor.
Both the iX and the Macan have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front and rear side-impact airbags, driver and front passenger knee airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, four-wheel antilock brakes, all wheel drive, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, post-collision automatic braking systems, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, rearview cameras and available around view monitors.
The BMW iX weighs 1259 to 1618 pounds more than the Porsche Macan. The NHTSA advises that heavier vehicles are much safer in collisions than their significantly lighter counterparts.