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BMW X7 (2019 - 2022)

SIZEMIC SEVEN (some text hidden) --NONE--

By Jonathan Crouch

Introductionword count: 77

BMW's X7 classily meets the needs of wealthy buyers wanting a super-luxury large SUV and needing to seat up to seven adults. It's essentially a super-sized X5, but it makes far more of a pavement statement and inside, feels very high-end indeed. If you don't much care what the neighbours think - or perhaps even if you do - then you'd probably quite like one. Here, we look at the early 2019-2021 pre-facelift versions of this model.

Modelsword count: 2

5dr SUV

Historyword count: 440

Not every new car these days is designed with a specific eye on European buyers. Take this one, the BMW X7, an enormous luxury seven-seat SUV that was launched back in 2019 primarily aimed at customers in America, the Middle East, China and various Asian markets. But BMW thought that better-heeled buyers with larger families here might like one too. It took the Munich maker some time to make an SUV this big. Their X5 has defined the large SUV class for over two decades amongst Mercedes GLEs and Porsche Cayennes. But prior to 2019, the company had never fielded a bigger 4x4 - or a proper seven-seat version of this kind of car to take on the larger Mercedes GLS. The sort of product that would begin to interest the kind of customer who'd usually be browsing in the super-luxury large SUV segment where the Range Rover rules. The X7, announced in late 2018 and put on sale here a few months after, was tasked with attracting exactly this well-heeled brand of buyer. If you know anything about this car, you'll have already gathered that it's quite a size, but of course that's relative to your point of comparison. True, it's a little bigger than a Range Rover, but you'd expect that given that an X7 has an extra row of seats. It's actually a little smaller than its most obvious rival, the Mercedes GLS. And considerably smaller than the ultimate contender you could have in this class, the Rolls Royce Cullinan. Even so, this is easily the most substantial - and certainly the heaviest - piece of automotive real estate BMW has ever brought us. The brand always wanted us to think of this car less as a super-sized X5 and more as an alternative to the boardroom segment 7 Series saloon with which it shares its imposing front grille. The X7's underpinnings though are shared directly with the X5, as were many other things - the standard air suspension and the optional Off-Road package for example. Plus the two cars rolled down the same American Spartanburg production line. This one though, was a far more exclusive sight in our market. It was, according to its maker, 'a triumph of spatial thinking'. Certainly, if you want the very best large SUV from the 2019-2021 period and it has to seat seven, you'd need to consider it. The X7's main xDrive30d diesel engine was replaced by a more powerful xDrive40d unit in 2020. Then the car continued on sale in its original form until Spring 2022, when it was significantly updated. It's the pre-facelift models we look at here.

What You Getword count: 604

US, Asian and Middle Eastern buyers want their luxury SUVs to be big and very imposing, so the X7 is. If you want one here, that's what you're going to like about it. Is the huge over-sized front grille a step too far? Not if you take the view that there's simply no point in a car that's 5.15-metres long, 2-metres wide and over 1.8-metres high being aesthetically shy and retiring. This one certainly isn't. As is appropriate in such a large SUV, you climb up into the driver's seat of an X7 and find yourself positioned commandingly in a cabin that's high in quality but perhaps lacking a little in terms of sheer specialness. It's hard to fault the cabin ergonomics, which see you perfectly positioned on brilliantly supportive multifunctional 'Comfort' seats trimmed in stitched Merino leather. And viewing digital screen technology delivered by the 'Live Cockpit Professional' package that combines a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster display with a centre-dash infotainment monitor of the same size, all of it accessible via touchscreen, the usual lower iDrive touch controller or voice control. There's some clever stuff incorporated into this sophisticated set-up, including gesture control and what BMW calls an 'Intelligent Personal Assistant', which works a bit like the 'Siri' or 'Google Assistant' systems you might use on your 'phone and is there to answer questions you can voice to the car as you drive it. Once you take a seat in the second row, you'll quickly appreciate the generous leg room on offer made possible by this car's lengthy 3,105mm wheelbase. Most X7s were sold in the standard seven-seat configuration, which gives you a three person bench. Your alternative is to get a car whose original owner specified the optional 'Six-Seater' package which instead fits out the second row with two individual 'Comfort'-spec seats similar to those at the front, each with their own armrests and cushioned headrests. That'll give second row folk more luxury and more room to spread out, plus it'll make it easier to get to the rearmost seating row. But of course it'll mean compromises in terms of seat-folding flexibility and, obviously, passenger capacity. On balance, we'd prefer to stick with a car fitted with the conventional middle bench. After all, it's not as if you're lacking luxury. You get exquisitely cushioned head rests, plus electric seat controls for the two outer positions adjust the back rests and move the powered seat bases through a range of 145mm. Right, enough with that. What about the third row? It's supposed to be 'adult-friendly'. Once installed in the very back, there's pretty much the same sort of space as you'd find in a large MPV. In short, what's on offer in the X7 is a first class SUV that doesn't demote third row passengers to third class travel. And the boot? Well the powered two-piece tailgate can be operated by gesture control and opens to reveal a cargo area that offers 326-litres (about the size of the boot of a Ford Focus), even when all three seating rows are in use. To make loading easier, you can lower the height of the air suspension using a button on the edge of the lowered tailgate panel. More buttons on the left hand side of the hatch aperture allow you to electrically retract the rearmost pews and virtually double the size of your cargo area. And you can electrically retract the second row bench too, which can if necessary fold in a 40:20:40-split, eventually freeing up as much as 2,120-litres of total capacity, assuming you've stuck with your X7 in its standard seven-seat form.

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Pictures (high res disabled)

Scoring (subset of scores)

Category: Crossover or SUV 4x4s

Performance
80%
Handling
70%
Comfort
80%
Space
80%
Styling, Build, Value, Equipment, Depreciation, Handling, Insurance and Total scores are available with our full data feed.

This is an excerpt from our full review.
To access the full content library please contact us on 0330 0020 227 or click here

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