I don’t watch golf, nor know much about it. But hitting a hole-in-one seems like one of the most impressive, if lucky, achievements in sports achievements. The odds seem impossible to me. The hole is barely bigger than the ball, and it’s often almost two entire football fields away from the tee. Naturally, whenever it does happen, it can be rewarded with an exciting prize. In this case, a brand-new BMW iX5.
French golfer Frédéric Lacroix did just that at the 2026 PGA BMW Championship at the Wentworth Club in the UK. At the 14th hole, Lacroix hits one of the cleanest holes-in-on I’ve ever seen (admittedly, I’ve only ever seen a few thanks to social media), as the ball sails high, hits the ground right near the hole, takes a couple of small bounces, and goes right in. The prize for such a rare shot was a BMW iX5, which makes it quite the valuable shot, worth at least the $81,250 starting price. However, this isn’t just a base model iX5, it’s a nicely equipped iX5 xDrive 60 M Sport.
Being an iX5 xDrive 60 M Sport (German car names are sounding more and more like NFL playcalls), it packs dual electric motors making 570 horsepower and 593 lb-ft of torque. Those motors get juice from a massive 141 kWh battery pack — American iX5’s will get a 144 kWh battery — which gives it 525 miles of WLTP-rated range. The U.S. EPA estimates it’ll have 435 miles of range when they get their hands on it. So even though the iX5 isn’t exactly the looker of BMW’s lineup, its spec certainly make up for it.
The combination of specs and looks must have really appealed to Lacroix, since he chose it. This year, BMW tweaked its prize formula and had every pro in the tournament choose from ten different BMWs to be their prize, should they get a hole-in-one. Whichever pro made the first hole-in-one would win either that chosen BMW, or the iX5 that was on site. We don’t know what Lacroix’s original choice was, but he ended up choosing the on-site iX5 instead anyway. Maybe it was already an iX5, which would have made his choice easier.