With the unveiling of the new BMW i7 we welcome you to a new era for high-end luxury cars. Still need that big capacity petrol engine? Sure, BMW will sell you a petrol or even a diesel version of its boldly designed new 7 series, but its luxury game now has the fully electric BMW i7 at its heart. Ditch any lingering nostalgia you might have for the ultimate driving machine and set your co-ordinates for a world-beating digital experience, genuine sustainability, and outrageous levels of on-board comfort. This is the way to go.
The i7 also contains the ultimate crowd-pleaser: a 31.8in ‘Theatre Screen’ that folds out of the roof, to stream content or handle Zoom calls to whomever is lucky enough to be sitting in the back. BMW says the new car was designed from the inside out, and it’s easy to believe that – for various reasons. The more scabrous corners of the car-loving internet think BMW’s design bosses have lost their minds, but the company’s CEO, Oliver Zipse, is unrepentant. ‘There is no such thing as a future-oriented design without controversy,’ he tells GQ. ‘We want to spark discussion about what we’re doing. I want controversy. If we don’t have it, then you already know it’s too easy. Digitalise it, electrify it, make it a bit bigger. That’s the answer.’
It’s certainly one answer. Inevitably, the new 7 series is better appreciated in the flesh, imposing and defiantly modern, too much so to be truly elegant. Positive polarisation, you might say. EVs need to be slippery in order to improve their efficiency and range, and the 7 series is impressively aero-efficient despite its monolithic look. Go for the M Sport Package Pro and you get 21in alloy wheels, bigger brakes, and gloss black on the shiny bits, which helps dial the bling back. The upper section of the split-level lights are the main focal point, with the option of Swarovski ‘iconic glow’ crystal glass. The grille also illuminates at night to welcome the occupants. This is not a car for the faint-hearted, and its target audience is similarly statement-oriented. BMW’s biggest market is China, and they have well-defined tastes there.
The i7 xDrive60 has a combined 536bhp from two electric motors, its hardware very similar to the set-up in the excellent iX. The front motor delivers 255bhp, the rear one 308bhp, with 549lb ft of torque overall. The claimed 0-62mph time is 4.7 seconds and the i7’s top speed is limited to 149mph. We’re now up to Generation Five of BMW’s electric powertrain and the charging software is constantly improving in terms of thermal management and efficiency. There are also no rare earth metals in the motor.
The lithium ion battery pack provides 101.7 kWh of useable energy and sits comfortably under the floor. BMW claims between 3.1 and 3.3 miles per kWh, and a range of up to 388 miles on a full charge. Find a 195 kW fast charger and you should be able to add 106 miles in about 10 minutes. That’s a useful real-world mid-journey energy uplift.
The i7 is an astonishing thing to drive. There’s enough power and torque to fire this big, heavy car off the line with impressive rapidity. But the real magic isn’t in its pace, it’s in the refinement. This is a car with a world-beating, extraordinarily engineered sense of hush. The i7 is also an amazingly fluent machine on the move, with superb body control and the sort of sublime ride quality demanded by real world Logan Roys. Turns out that the silent majesty of BMW’s slick electric powertrain is perfectly suited to a 5.1m-long super-limo. The brakes are excellent, too, and have a nicely metered regenerative function to harvest and store energy usually lost when slowing down.
There’s also the full set of assistance systems, much of them safety-oriented, others in pursuit of autonomous driving. In North America, the i7 will let you drive hands-off the steering wheel at speeds up to 81mph, but it didn’t work when we tried it. We prefer to stay in control anyway. The 7 series will also park itself remotely, or via the BMW App, but honestly, how lazy do you have to be? Either that, or you’ll be paying someone to do the driving – and parking – for you.
Front or back, the 7 series probably has the best car interior in the world. As in the iX, its Curved Display is both ergonomically ingenious but also beautiful to look at. Core to BMW’s push to digitalisation, it combines a 12.3in instrument display with a longer 14.9in main infotainment glass touch-screen. It tidies up the real estate around the dashboard, and everything, including the controls for the air conditioning, is now subsumed within the central screen. It works well. The screen itself sits on slender brackets on top of an open-pore matt wood trim, like a piece of high-end furniture. Audio, navigation, Apple Carplay and so on live in individual, customisable tiles. There’s voice activation, too, which understands not just multiple languages but tricky dialects, too.
Beneath the central screen is the ‘Interaction Bar’, new on the 7 series, which has a crystalline surface and backlighting, and stretches pretty much the width of the cabin. Crystal is definitely a BMW thing at the moment. It takes its colour cues from whichever of the ‘My Modes’ you’ve gone for; red for Sport, green for Expressive, blue for Efficient. Recent BMW Art Car artist Cao Fei has even created a bespoke Digital Art Mode. These also alter the sound signature, as co-developed with Hollywood movie soundtrack maestro, Hans Zimmer, and they’re mostly variations on an escalating sci-fi pulse. Zimmer loves the Shepherd tone, which ascends or descends without ever resolving. You can turn it all off.
Also new on the 7 are automatic doors. There’s a little button below the wheel that closes the door from inside, or you can set the system so that the driver’s door shuts when you press the brake pedal. Or use the voice activation if you truly can’t be bothered. The doors’ gyros recognise inclines and possible hazards, and there’s no disputing the cleverness, but it’s not like closing a car door has ever been that challenging.
The seats are absolutely magnificent, with multi-functionality and a suite of vigorous massage programmes. The back of the head-rests have wood trim with electro-plated accent strips. The (optional) wool cashmere trim is sustainable and looks and feels fantastic. Various different interior treatments are available for the wood and metals. BMW set out to deliver an interior unlike anything ever previously attempted, and they’ve nailed it. You could easily forget you’re actually sitting in a car.
Then there’s that much-anticipated 31.3in 8K Theatre Screen. Expensive cars have long had television screens in them, usually recessed in the back of the head-rests. And the iPad is pretty good for watching stuff on. But this set-up is next-level, not just because the screen folds out of a recess in the roof-lining, but also because it has built-in Amazon Fire TV connectivity and runs Bowers & Wilkins surround sound. An optional version gets you 36 speakers and 1,965 watts of output, with exciters in the seat back-rests. The audio quality is exquisite. Streaming capability varies according to territory, but we watched some ‘content’ travelling down a twisty road without feeling unwell, the rear- and side sun-blinds automatically raised and the panoramic sunroof closed.
That, by the way, is done via a 5.5in digital control unit with an iPhone-like screen integrated into rear door trim. As in the front, the seats are exceptional. Order the Executive Lounge option and you’ll get perhaps the finest, most complex seat ever fitted in a car: the front passenger seat slides and tilts as far forward as it’ll go, leaving the rear occupant free to recline to 42.5° – a record in this class – and there’s no gap in the calf support area, either.
Prices for the i7 xDrive60 start at £108,305, but a trip through the online configurator quickly sends that figure rapidly skyward. Potential owners will be too busy having fun to notice. The rest of us can marvel at the car that has just raised the bar and then some.
