Charting Un-x-plored Territory

BMW Expands Its Bulging Suv Portfolio With a Seventh Variant, Which – Coincidentally – Is a ‘7 Series in Suv Form’. So, Say Hello to 2019’s X7, Here Tested in Prototype Form

- Matt Robinson

It has taken a while — pretty much 20 years — but finally BMW is going to have a crack at tackling the Range Rover conundrum head-on. It was 1999 when BMW made its first foray into the SUV marketplace with the X5, a vehicle that, along with its closely related X6 sibling, has sold more than two million units worldwide.

And BMW wasn’t that slow in recognising the commercial success, following up the X5 with the smaller X3 in 2003, before also adding the X1, the X4 and the X2 to its portfolio, in order to fill in all the gaps in the sequence. However, that still leaves the X5 as the biggest, most practical and most luxurious of the BMW SUV offering, what with its ‘5+2’ seating arrangement and array of powerful engines. Nevertheless, for some buyers, the X5 is not opulent enough, certainly not in a world that now contains SUVs from brands with the cachet of Maserati, Porsche, Bentley and Rolls-Royce.

Thus, BMW has at last got around to doing what it always intended to do, once it had launched the X5 in the very last embers of the old millennium: that is, to make a bigger SUV than its long-reigning flagship. Here, then, is the BMWX7, and while that numbering neatly places it atop the pre-existing six SUV lines BMW already has, it also pertains to two more facts. One, BMW reckons the X7 is like ‘a 7 Series in SUV form’. And two, it encapsulates the number of full-sized seats on board; seven, in a 2-3-2 formation as standard. Rather ruining the numerical tidiness of BMW’s newest high-riding machine, though, there’s an option to have six seats instead, the middle row going from a bench to a pair of captain’s chairs that are actually the front seats from the forthcoming BMW 8 Series GT.