Review / We review BMW's 'big boy' X7 - is the new US$100,000-plus SUV worth buying?
German carmaker finally offers vehicle with a third row of seats, which, if you can live with the oversized front grille, may be your dream big ‘Bimmer’, writes Matthew DeBord
All the major premium carmakers have taken the plunge and added three rows of seating to their vehicles, as SUV sales have taken over the United States market.
However, BMW was a laggard; its wonderful X5 was a hit with customers, but the lack of a third row was losing the Bavarian company some sales.
You could jump from a BMW to Audi and its Q7, if you added a third child to the family or simply wanted to haul some extra friends around.
Enter the X7, BMW’s “big boy” – a 5,600-pound (2.540kg) baby! BMW let me look after the vehicle for a week … check out how it was to use.
Our 2019 BMW X7 xDrive50i test vehicle arrived in a dashing “Arctic Grey Metallic” paint job. The X7 is built in South Carolina, in the US, and without options this SUV costs US$92,600. Our version, with all the extras, cost US$108,000.
We’ll talk about the big front chrome grille in a moment. Head-on, the now-familiar, modern, sleek headlights – sophisticated, adaptive LEDs, no less – are completely out of proportion, as is the BMW badge.
From the side, hmmm … The X7 is definitely large. In fact, this is the first BMW I’ve ever tested that has so much physical bulk that you lose the famous “Hofmeister kink” at the end of the side windows.
Yes, the grille. HUGE! It looks as if it fell off a Bentley from the 1920s. I hated it at first, but the more I looked at it, the more I appreciated the ambition.