2026 BMW i7 review: Buyers of BMW’s flagship have one surprising trait

[SINGAPORE] If you want to watch a BMW employee squirm, ask them why the 7 Series has such a gargoyle face, then sit back and watch as they issue a spluttering protest to the contrary.

The honest answer, I suspect, is that the brand’s flagship car was never meant to be pretty or graceful, but imposing and provocative.

So maybe it says something that the mid-life facelift (or Life Cycle Impulse, or LCI, to use a BMW marketing term) for the latest 7 (codenamed G70) was unusually thorough.

In addition to new bumpers and lights, BMW gave it a reshaped bonnet and something of a nosejob that slimmed down and sharpened its grille. The result is neater and better looking, without being any less provocative or brooding.

While I wouldn’t call the G70 LCI a stunner now, it does look like it rolled out of the Dark Deco Gotham City of the 1990s Batman cartoon, with its monolithic slabs and glowing grille.

You can well imagine that the man behind the wheel has a secret cave stocked with weapons and a latex suit with a cowl.

The major makeover might imply that BMW was trying to fix something about the 7, but in truth, the car’s product team probably started on this facelift even before the G70’s launch in 2022.

By then, they would have known that BMW was about to pivot to the Neue Klasse (or “new class”) technology platform that provides the bones of the current iX3 and upcoming i3 Series, but couldn’t glom from it for the 7 Series in time.

Four years later, if the new i7 50 xDrive is anything to go by, the new 7 has borrowed as much as it could from the Neue Klasse cars.

Launched here solely in spicy M Sport trim, the pure electric limo gets BMW’s latest-generation battery cells, which stretch the claimed range to 728 km on a good day.

If you still want petrol power, a 3.0-litre turbo version, the 735, kicks off the range at S$684,888 with a Certificate of Entitlement.

You still press a Start button to wake up the i7, unlike the iX3’s get-in-and-go approach, and the brakes aren’t programmed for the same smooth stops as in the Neue Klasse cars, but you do get the snazzy display systems from the very newest BMWs.

That includes the Panoramic Vision Display – a strip of information along the base of the windscreen which looks gorgeous, keeps your eyes up near the road and stays crisply legible in all conditions.

The main touchscreen took me a while to work out, and since nearly every physical control has been purged, adjusting the air-conditioning means jabbing at glass.

For this I blame China, where buttons are apparently passe and big screens are a big deal (hence a new extra screen for the front passenger). At this price though, would it kill BMW to leave me a few knobs to twist, so I can see where my money went?

Another complaint: The glass roof warms up in the sun and radiates heat at your head, even with the roller shade drawn. At least the much-improved air-conditioning vents chill the cabin better. 

Still, driving the i7 50 made me forget its foibles because it’s still a class act underneath its passengers’ bums.

Air springs give it a pillowy ride, but when you’re feeling frisky you can engage Sport mode to lower the car so it hunkers down for fast corners, tackling them with a taut precision you don’t expect of a limousine.

Rear-axle steering, which turns the back wheels slightly, makes it surprisingly wieldy, too. And while many cars have turned harsh chasing sportiness, the envelope between plushness and agility here is impressively wide.

With 455 horsepower, the i7 50 lunges to 100 kmh in 5.5 seconds, but it feels quicker because it responds instantly to every twitch of your right foot.

It’s fast in an authoritative way, and it’s almost too quiet on the move; at a steady cruise the ears pick up a faint gearbox whine, because there’s little else to hear.

All this matters because, surprisingly, most 7 Series buyers here still prefer to do the driving themselves.

I suppose that makes sense, because as plush and roomy as it is in the back of the BMW, people who prefer to be driven can now tool around in lounge-on-wheels machines such as the Lexus LM or Zeekr 009.

That said, BMW’s own i5 is sharper to drive and not much less refined than the i7.

So why bother with a 7 Series?

Because it’s undeniably grand, it has presence and, with the owner behind the wheel, it signals both wealth and a certain self-deterministic world view.

It still isn’t pretty, but then nobody in Gotham admires the gargoyles, either. They’re just where the man in charge perches to look down on the city.