2016 BMW 750i xDrive
It's more butler than car.
- Nov 2015
- By JARED GALL
- Photography By ROY RITCHIE
- Illustration By MARTIN LAKSMAN
- INSTRUMENTED TEST
From the December 2015 issue
Never mind what you think you see here. This is not a car as we know it. Yes, you can drive it—or it can drive for you during your 15-second catnap. It will perfume the air you breathe and draw the shades if the sun is too bright. It can recline your seat, clear the space ahead, and deploy an ottoman. Approach the car and it’ll roll out what BMW calls a “Light Carpet,” an LED-projected runway welcoming you. It’ll remind you of speed limits, but wouldn’t dare suggest you obey them. And when you reach your destination, it will park for you, or just act as spotter if you prefer to do it yourself. It’ll even stomp on the brakes if you don’t see an obstacle and get too close. The new BMW 7-series isn’t just a car. It’s a concierge, a four-wheeled passe-partout.
Here, in the concierge class, luxury means something more than just highly adjustable and supremely comfortable ventilated leather seats, which, of course, this 750i xDrive has in both the front and rear. Or a high-end stereo system, which in this case is a Bowers & Wilkins with 1400 watts and 16 speakers that include Kevlar midranges and “diamond tweeters with Nautilus technology,” a description that probably took longer to write than it takes to manufacture lesser speakers. BMW chief designer Karim Habib says modern luxury means “offering the customer what they want before they know they want it.”
“
Where to this morning, boss? And will you need that jacket pressed?”
Which is why, like any proficient attendant, the 7-series now responds to hand gestures such as waves, points, and impatient finger twirls. A dismissive flick of the wrist ignores incoming calls. Pointing at the infotainment screen accepts them. Twirling your finger clockwise in front of the screen turns up the volume; counterclockwise turns it down. A two-fingered point can be programmed to do any number of things: set a specific destination, play “After All” by Cher and Peter Cetera from a connected phone, play other songs less terrible.
Any buttons that look like metal actually are. They're cool when it's cold out, warm when it's hot, and they'll melt your fingerprints during summertime in Arizona. The ceramic trim on the iDrive, HVAC, and stereo knobs is part of the $3200 Executive package.
Where Habib sees a luxury feature, we see a gimmick. But if you don’t like Gesture Control, you don’t have to use it. With the addition of touch-screen control and an optional tablet between the rear seats, there are now five ways to interact with the 7-series’s iDrive infotainment system (the knob and voice commands being the other two). The race to incorporate mind control is on, however our bet is on dark horse—or would that be space horse?—Tesla.
Few earthbound vehicles boast such diverse and high-tech construction as the new 7-series, with the 2016 model representing the auto industry’s most mainstream application yet of structural carbon fiber [see “Material Girl”]. BMW says it trimmed 88 pounds from the 7’s unibody, and the example tested here weighed 4883 pounds, more than 100 pounds lighter than the previous-generation 750i xDrive we had for a long-term test.
All the major suspension components are adjustable. Air springs tweak the ride height based on load, speed, and vehicle setting. Adjustable dampers and anti-roll bars vary the ride between soft and firm. The newly available Active Comfort Drive with Road Preview adjusts chassis systems according to data drawn from the navigation system. Not even the rear-wheel toe angle is fixed, as BMW’s rear steering is available for the first time with four-wheel drive. But within the panoply of settings, modes, and choices, is there one that delivers the sensations we expect of a BMW?
Yes. Sort of. Depending on the suspension mode—comfort plus, comfort, or sport—it can be a Rolls, a Benz, or a BMW. Comfort plus, the squishiest, allows for surprising float, with the car leaning wildly in turns. We can’t imagine many roundel loyalists engaging that one, but it might ease the transition for any unfortunates forced to downgrade from BMW’s super-lux British subsidiary. Comfort mode can still rock a baby to sleep but is unlikely to induce seasickness. Sport is the true BMW setting, nicely balancing control with comfort. In it, suspension and body motions are firmly damped, but without an overly sporting edge. This is, after all, a car with an optional rear-seat package aimed at chauffeured buyers. The Jaguar XJ and even the Audi A8 are firmer, but we question to what extent buyers at this price point need their long-wheelbase sedan to behave like the M3 they park next to.
And either way, 0.88 g on the skidpad is respectable for a vehicle that can indulge in such un-BMW behavior in comfort-plus mode. The steering is responsive and linear but light on feel, which engineers tell us is intentional. We enthusiasts might think the 7 should be an XXXL M235i, but the people who buy them think otherwise, finding bothersome the little twitches and tugs emblematic of good steering. And if the car feels closer to a Mercedes S-class than any BMW, maybe that’s because the S-class outsells the 7-series two to one. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, correct? But BMW has always provided good brakes, and whether it’s the driver who slams on them or the car’s computer, the 750i stops from 70 mph in just 161 feet—impressive considering its mass. The pedal is progressive, but rather soft.
Despite funneling most of the R&D money into the gadgets, gizmos, and gimmicks department, BMW reserved enough to let the powertrain guys throw a nice spaetzle party. The 750i’s 4.4-liter twin-turbo V-8 gets revised intake and exhaust manifolds, plus a half-point bump in compression ratio, from 10:1 to 10.5:1. Twin-scroll turbos replace the single-scroll units used in the old car. Output stands pat at 445 horsepower and 480 pound-feet of torque, but efficiency increases, with highway fuel economy bumping up 1 mpg, to 25. The city rating is frozen at 16. It’s a strong, smooth engine, and with a ZF eight-speed automatic shuffling the gears and xDrive sending power to all four wheels, we hit 60 mph in 4.4 seconds—only 0.4 second behind an M5 manual. It blitzed the quarter in 12.8 at 112 mph.
BMW says the transmission is updated to interface with the nav system and tweak shift strategy based on the terrain. Without an equivalent reference car lacking the system or any dramatic grades to climb, it was impossible to tell if the transmission was downshifting because we were braking into a corner, because the nav system told it a turn was approaching, or because it was accounting for migratory behavior of Pacific orca pods and trending celebrity gossip. Whatever input it’s considering, the ultra-wide eight-speed is seamless and quick to snatch the right gear when it decides it’s in the wrong one.
Above, clockwise from left: You can't play Game of War on the Display Key yet. Backup camera looks like a video game but turns off above crawling speed. In chauffeur mode, kick back andhey, will someone jailbreak this tablet already? For now, driving still requires human attention.
Even the key is something special. The optional Display Key ($250) incorporates a small screen on which the driver can check to see if the doors were left unlocked or the windows down, or how long it is until the next scheduled oil change. Our challenge to BMW engineers: Link the key to various household appliances so owners will know if they’ve left the oven on or the curling iron plugged in. If all of that sounds frivolous, know that the key has a second battery to control essential items such as the door locks and starting the car.
The Display Key was the least expensive single item in our test car’s $30,850 options bill. The tab also included three different packages costing a combined $12,850 that cut the seating capacity from five to four and added heating, ventilation, and massage—plus heated armrests—in all four positions; video screens on the front-seat backrests; and a removable tablet allowing rear-seat passengers near-full control over the car’s systems. Driver-assistance systems, including self-parking and the semi-autonomous Active Driving Assistant Plus, which will perform all necessary driving tasks so long as the driver’s hands remain on the wheel, tallied another $7700. Luxury, appearance, and technology features made up the remainder.
It’s no coincidence that BMW is introducing what it calls Encore Delivery with the new 7-series. The Encore is a visit buyers schedule post-delivery where a BMW representative explains how to use any functions of their new car that they haven’t yet figured out. If only the car would drive itself for longer, the driver would have more time to study. When the day comes that it can, it won’t just be for safety or traffic-flow reasons. It’ll be because we ran out of other things for our wheeled butlers to do.
More To the Point
Point an index finger straight up and twirl it around and it’s a nonverbal “la-di-da.” Aim that gesture at your own head and it implies someone is cuckoo. Hold it out in front of you while someone else is talking and it says, “Move it along.” But direct it at your 7-series’s center screen and it becomes an imprecise way of turning up the volume (how many twirls for a two-click volume increase?), a physical control for which is already at the tip of your thumb while your hands are at rest on the steering wheel. More than the redundancy, though, it’s Gesture Control’s limited vocabulary that makes it feel contrived, and so we suggest BMW broaden the functionality to include more tasks:
Engage M warp drive, overboost function generating 600 horsepower Self-park in garage
Adjust music to indicated tempo Full system check
Engage massaging seat Navigation set to Texas
Perform J-turn Navigation set to nearest heavy-metal festival [Note: system confusion likely; voice-control inputs recommended]
Alternative parking controls [baton with Dakota leather grips, $350; Merino leather grips, $775] Navigation set to nearest hospital; driver’s wrist is broken
Material Girl
Carmakers live in a material world. They must choose metals and composites capable of delivering light, stiff car bodies at a reasonable cost. But instead of following the aluminum-intensive precedents set by Audi, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche, BMW is pushing a new structural concept it calls “Carbon Core” for its sixth-generation 7-series sedan.
While this new flagship’s unibody is composed mainly of welded high-strength steel stampings, BMW says it is 88 pounds lighter and notably stiffer than its predecessor. Lessons learned from the i3 and i8 science projects are behind the 15 carbon-fiber-reinforced moldings applied to high-stress areas [see illustration]. Tubular arches tucked neatly inside the windshield and door-opening framework are the most interesting composite parts.
But there’s ample aluminum here, too, including the extruded longitudinal chassis members, the die-cast spring seats, the brake-rotor hats, and the stampings for the hood, decklid, and doors. A magnesium space frame supports the instrument panel and steering column, and the front fenders are plastic.
So it’s as light as a Mazda Miata? No. But such strict dieting is what allowed BMW to gorge on creature comforts and advanced driver aids.
