PALMS SPRINGS, Calif.—For decades, automakers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz have fought each other in group tests for the title of “world’s best car,” an honor awarded by various magazines. The battle has usually been between the 7 Series and the S-Class, with occasional challenges from Lexus. Jaguar and Cadillac often trail behind.
Today, there’s a serious new contender for the crown as BMW’s newest generation 7 Series goes on sale.
I got hooked on cars-as-technology during the early ’90s, and what a way the cars have come since, as powertrains have pushed new limits and energy sources, and interiors have become more cosseting and protective of their occupants.
The Bavarian OEM made the decision a few years ago to invest in a powertrain-agnostic vehicle architecture, so the new 7 Series will be available with an internal combustion engine, as a plug-in hybrid (which will come to the US in time), and as a fully battery-electric version called the i7. BMW brought both gasoline and BEVs to Palm Springs for the international first drive, and you can read about the 760i xDrive elsewhere on these pages today.
But the star of the show is the i7, which yet again proves that if you want to make a luxury car even better, give it electric motors.
The electric version has full feature parity with its petrol-powered partner, including a new advanced driver assistance system that lets you cruise hands-free on premapped divided-lane highways and a huge curved theater display for lucky rear seat passengers. BMW has even managed to make the car fun to drive.
The electric powertrain tech in the i7 is now relatively familiar. It’s BMW’s 5th-generation EV powertrain, and it debuted in last year’s i4 sedan and iX SUV. It uses the same family of electrically excited synchronous motors for both axles, fed by a lithium-ion battery pack that uses prismatic cells. (BMW is switching to cylindrical cells for its sixth-gen EV platform, which we’ll see in 2025’s Neue Klasse.)
There’s just a single i7 on sale for now, the $119,300 i7 xDrive60. The vehicle uses a 255 hp (190 kW), 296 lb-ft (401 Nm) front motor and a 308 hp (230 kW), 280 lb-ft (380 Nm) rear motor with a combined total output of 536 hp (400 kW) and 549 lb-ft (745 Nm). The battery pack has a usable 101.7 kWh out of a total capacity of 105.7 kWh.
The i7 has an official EPA range estimate of 318 miles (512 km) on the smaller 19-inch wheels and 308 miles (496 km) when clad with 21-inch wheels, as was our test car. Over the course of a 2.5-hour drive that featured a lot of elevation change and very little urban driving, I averaged 2.7 miles/kWh (23 kWh/100 km), slightly better than the 2.6 miles/kWh (23.9 kWh/100km) EPA rating.
Charging ups and downs
DC fast-charging takes 34 minutes to return the battery to 80 percent state of charge (SoC), or 80 miles (129 km) for every 10 minutes, and i7 owners will get three years of unlimited charging sessions at Electrify America. I attempted to charge my test i7, but my fast-charging attempt ended in partial success. I arrived at the charger with 56 percent SoC remaining, but the session was terminated due to a fault or error after just a few minutes and 9.5 kWh, which took the battery to 67 percent SoC.
If I had actually needed to top the battery up to 80 percent, I’d have unplugged the car and plugged it back in to try to troubleshoot, but I didn’t need 80 percent and didn’t feel like wasting half an hour on the phone to be told that no one else knows why it happens, either.
Upon my return, I let the BMW engineers know about the issue, and when they learned I was using an EVgo charger, they gave a knowing nod and said yes, they had been experiencing problems with that bank all month. (BMW brought in waves of international media over several weeks to drive the i7; Ars and the other US and Canadian outlets were the last of those.) Beyond that, they didn’t know what the problem was, which just reinforces my argument about fast-charger reliability from earlier this summer.
I would anticipate no such problems using an AC charger, also known as a Level 2 charger. The i7 will accept single-phase 240 V AC up to 11 kW, and that will charge an entirely flat battery from 0 to 100 percent SoC in 10.5 hours.
At highway speeds, about 60 percent of an EV’s energy is used to push the car through the air. That has made pursuing aerodynamically efficient body shapes much more important than it was in the past, with the result that we’ve seen a series of lower and lower drag vehicles appear in showrooms.
BMW eked out a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.24 for the i7, a number that would be unheard of a decade ago. It’s not quite as low as rival Mercedes-Benz’s EQS sedan, which has a Cd of just 0.2, but the BMW has a slightly smaller frontal area. Drag reduction and airflow control explain some of the i7s detailing. Air curtains shape the flow from the front of the car around the wheels, and an entirely flat underbody helps the air on its path under the car. At the rear, little edges emerge from parts of the light cluster that prevent the airflow from sucking the car backward slightly at speed.
The driver also notices the aerodynamicist’s attention at highway speeds, as it translates to a quiet journey with minimal wind noise; when driving in silence, the most noticeable sound was the roar of other cars’ tires on CA-111’s rough surface.
A luxury car, especially a big, expensive one like this, needs to be a good cruiser. And if anything, I think the i7 does this job better than the gasoline-powered 7 Series. That’s partly because of the much lower inherent NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness) of an electric powertrain, which doesn’t have a whole load of mechanical parts thrashing up and down thousands of times a minute, but I think the added weight of the battery damps some jolts and vibrations you might notice in the 760i. (Neither car could be thought of as light; the i7’s curb weight is 5,917 lbs (2,684 kg), and the 760i weighs 4,969 lbs (2,254 kg).)
The Highway Assistant
Highway driving becomes less of a chore thanks to the Highway Assistant, a new advanced driver assistance system that works much like General Motors’ Super Cruise or Ford’s Bluecruise. It’s a partially automated system, also referred to as “level 2+,” that only operates on geofenced highways that have been HD-mapped by HERE.
A driver-monitoring system embedded in the main display uses an infrared camera to track the driver’s gaze, ensuring that the system only operates while the driver is paying attention to the road ahead. And I was always sure of what mode I was in. The augmented reality setting for the main display is something we’ve seen before in the Mercedes EQS and BMW iX, where it shows up on the infotainment screen, and the Cadillac Escalade, where, as with the i7, it’s in front of the driver. It’s very effective here at showing the driver when Highway Assistant is running, and it displays the lane as bright green, with a target box bounding a car ahead.
Highway Assistant was adept at keeping the car safely in its lane and handled curves well, and it would only change lanes upon command (a single tap of the indicator stalk in the direction you want to go) if there was a safe gap in traffic. The system operates up to 85 mph (137 km/h). Meanwhile, BMW has plans to introduce a lower-speed L3 assist in China and Germany that would work in heavy traffic up to 40 mph (60 km/h); for US use cases, the L2+ seems a better fit.
Responsive feel
For many years, BMW’s marketing has reinforced the message that it builds drivers’ cars, so it would be a shame if the highlight of driving the i7 was an appreciation for its decent hands-free ADAS feature.
Happily, that’s not the case. In fact, the i7 was a delight to drive, especially on stretches of CA-74 and CA-243—and at very sub-legal speeds, too. Mountain roads with sheer drops to one side always give me a case of the willies, but I felt secure and comfortable enough in the i7 to get close to the 55 mph limit with nary a white knuckle to be seen.
Remarkably, BMW has engineered steering feel into the i7, and despite its substantial mass, the near-instant response of the electric motors and air suspension means it feels like a car that weighs maybe half of that. The i7 engages the driver in a slightly different manner to the Porsche Taycan, which feels more like a four-door sports car than a luxury sedan, but both are cars that might make you take the longer, twistier road home.
An infotainment system that nails voice
The i7 uses BMW’s latest infotainment system, OS 8. We’ve seen it before, as it was introduced last year in the i4 and iX, but it’s so proficient that the automaker is in the process of adding it to each existing model in their life cycle refreshes—no mean feat as it involves a much more modern and advanced wiring network.
Some of my older and less digitally native peers found fault with the fact that some settings were buried deep in menus, but I must again point out that the natural language processing (which BMW partners with Cerence to deliver) is excellent. And I say that as someone who until very recently felt stupid talking to such systems, or even Siri.
Because of the fact that the NLP is running on the car or within BMW’s cloud and not someone else’s, it’s much more capable in terms of what it can control versus cars that run Android Automotive like the Polestar 2 or Cadillac Lyriq. So if you want to switch drive modes from efficiency to sport, raise the side blinds but lower the rear one, access the heads-up display settings, or turn on the seat massager, you could do that with the touchscreen, the rotary controller, or the relevant button on the door. Or you could just say, “hey BMW” and tell it what to do. It works that well.
