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 RZ doesn’t offer pre-crash pretensioners.
Both the iX and RZ 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 RZ’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 RZ doesn’t offer a whiplash protection system.
Both the iX and the RZ have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front 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, crash mitigating brakes, post-collision automatic braking systems, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, blind spot warning systems, rearview cameras, rear cross-path warning, driver alert monitors and available around view monitors.
The BMW iX weighs 1040 to 1205 pounds more than the Lexus RZ. The NHTSA advises that heavier vehicles are much safer in collisions than their significantly lighter counterparts.