Ban Ki-moon's Chariot: One Week with a BMW 7-Series

Most days, your humble car blogger pays his mortgage by working in the information technology field, putting out fires, listening to pitches, and saying no to people with a smile on his face.  But recently I was afforded a significant promotion: To CEO of a boutique drug company, or perhaps kingpin of an international weapons consortium, or even a mysterious consultant to the mineral extraction logistics industry.  Or so it seemed anyway after I was tossed the keys to a BMW 750i xDrive for a week.

(Thanks to my pals at Baron BMW in Merriam, Kansas, for the extended test drive.)

The big Bimmer approaches a valet stand much the way a Wally 58 arrives in some sundrenched port-of-call, the car's perceived bow wave announcing its arrival with stately presence and subtle authority:  This is not a car to be trifled with.  People who drive these things daily do not fly coach.  But whereas the Wally will see you sending a wire transfer for upwards of $3MM, the BMW can be yours at something just slightly north of one-hundred grand.

This particular example, finished in Dark Graphite Metallic paint of the deepest luster and outfitted with a Black Nappa Leather interior with burnished Gray Poplar wood trim, arrives as serenely as a Great White Shark; it’s large, in charge, vaguely sinister, yet always attracting respectful glances from onlookers.  It’s subtle and substantial, yet incongruously always ready to party.

To be sure, the 750i is a large car.  While it’s length and girth are admirably masked on the road, its size is readily apparent when you go to moor, er, park.  BMW has anticipated this and outfits the 750i with all manner of sensors, so that you’re always aware both visually and audibly where the corners of the car are.  If you run into something in this thing, it’s your own damn fault.  And of course, if the prospect of docking, er, parking is too intimidating you can always just pull up to a space and have the vehicle self-park.  Yes, it will self-park.  (And yes, I will at some point dispense with the nautical metaphors.)  If you let it self-park enough times, you will actually evolve out of your thumbs, because you are a lazy toad without the baseline skills to even consider piloting such a vehicle.  No, I’m not a fan of letting cars self-park.

The 750i xDrive is all about stately presence.

Its length is put to good use when you open the rear doors.  The rear passenger cabin on the big 7-series is almost impossibly large.  A friend of mine, a 6’6” ex-college quarterback and generally strapping Midwestern lad, sat in the back, extended his legs, and let out a whoop of delight; there was still a good 6” of room between his knees and the seat back ahead.  A much shorter friend sat down and was almost able to extend her legs fully.  This thing has an interior vista.

The "light curtain" welcomes you back.

And oh is it sumptuous.  Materials of the highest quality, leather from cattle who likely never saw a barbed wire fence, the loveliest of wood veneers, stitching that’s almost showing off. As Vincent Vega would put it, "It’s the little differences."  Car manufacturers have gotten great at making plastic look like metal; trompe l'oeil on an industrial scale. On the 7-series, what looks and feels like metal is metal. Lush, cold, smooth metal. Nice.  Or the way the seat belts are supple and pliable when you strap them on but then cinch up when the car is going more than 5mph.  Or the “light curtain” that illuminates the occupants path when the car is unlocked with the fob; a bit of useless theatricality that should be expected in such a vehicle but one that still never fails to delight.  “Look, to the Bat Cave!”  At this price point, details matter.

And then there’s the much ballyhooed “Gesture Control,” the hand-free control interface that will likely soon be everywhere in the BMW line.  There is something Fantasia-like about the gesture control, with the driver serving as Micky, aka the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a dramatic gesture causing all manner of Sturm und Drang to erupt (or at least the radio volume to increase or an incoming call to be answered).  While I fear from the outside it may look as if the well-healed driver suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, it’s a pretty cool parlor trick on the inside.  Though really, are we now actually designing advanced technology to encourage drivers to take their hands off the wheel?  (I believe this is what’s known as a “gateway drug” to the inevitable era of self-driving cars.  See my comments above about the “self-park” feature if you don’t believe this insidious encroachment is underway.)

The 750i xDrive is powered by an 8-liter diesel co-engineered by BMW and Caterpillar which was first used to transport SpaceX rocket boosters to their uphill launching pad.  Okay…it just feels that way.  The big Bimmer is actually propelled by a 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8, a brute of a motor that makes 445-horsepower and a mind-bending 480-ft/lbs of torque.  Coupled to a ZF 8-speed transmission lubricated with silkworms and the tears of the vanquished, the luxurobarge makes it off the line to 60mph in a BMW-reported 4.3 seconds (though Car and Driver Magazine recorded the run in 3.9 seconds).  It’s, well, fast.  Dumb fast.  Supercar fast.  And does so without spilling a morsel.  The power is linear to the point of fooling the driver into imagining a “d” (for Diesel) on the hind-end.  It’s a tank, pulling like a brute but a brute with the most refined manners.  Zany, stupid fun.  It doesn’t feel nearly as fast as the X6M I gloriously flogged recently, but it actually is in terms of the speed trap.  It’s how it makes its power that impresses, like an African despot who waves his hand to make it so; the expectation of results is assumed.

Driving modes on the big sedan are not called anything as mundane as “modes” but rather are referenced as ”Driving Experience Control.”  There’s something for everyone. Sport & Sport Individual (where the driver can customize damping, steering, engine, and transmission settings) are accompanied by the dash glowing a pulsating red, little devils practically perching on the driver’s shoulder. Comfort (Standard and Comfort Plus, when just the regular amount of comfort won’t do) set all dampers to their most cosseting.  EcoPro detunes the engine, mandates the annoying Start/Stop function, and generally drapes the driving experience with a double-dose of Benadryl (I’m convinced the setting only exists to keep the regulators happy; “Look how efficient our car has become!”).  My personal favorite of the settings is Adaptive, where the brains of the car tune performance to suit the moment-by-moment mood of the driver.  It’s responsive and intuitive, and after playing a bit with the other settings, I put the car in Adaptive and let it do its thing.  I imagine most owners will as well.

If you run into something at slow speed, don't say the 7-series didn't try and warn you.

The car is a wonder to drive, as easy to toss around as it is to go unreasonably fast, with only a whisper of piped-in artificial engine noise to provide any sort of exterior context. One afternoon, Dreamy Wife and her colleague “got all ‘Thelma and Louise’” (their words) and took it out for a spin.  “We felt like we should be dropping some diplomat off at the UN or something.” Dreamy reported a highway blast that began at 50 and ended somewhere above triple-digits before a quick glance as the heads-up display floating magically in the windshield caused her to consider the consequences.  The car was so effortlessly smooth it became “dangerously fast” she reported. 

BMW 7-series cars have always had their design quirks.  The previous generation was one of the most controversial in the history of the marque, with the vigorous “flame surfacing” design language favored by Chief Designer Chris Bangle that gave the car world the term “Bangle Butt.”  Current Chief Designer Adrian van Hooydonk tends to the more elegant, to my eye, though certain design decisions leave room for debate.  For example, the long, thin chrome hockey stick on the 7-series, with the blade mounted just behind the front wheel arch and the shaft forming the visual bottom of the door sill, seems to me only to accentuate the length of the car, though I imagine the notion was a more elegant transition to the sill than a simple cut line.  Several people remarked to me they thought the element was both classy and distinctive; to my eye it’s an unnecessary affectation.  But still.  It’s an elegant, stately car; adult and refined, not at all whimsical.   I still think the Audi A8 leads this class of car in terms of elegant, substantial design, but the big Bimmer trumps the Mercedes S-class in interesting style.  (Come on, Maserati, update the Quattroporte just a bit, will you?) I’ll take my 7-series in the form of the 750i-based Alpina B7 over the much more gauche Mercedes-AMG S63.   Your private golf club or gated community beckons.

At the end of the day, the 750i xDrive can make a legitimate argument for “Best Car in the World,” the apogee of automotive engineering, a bellwether vehicle that leads by design and technology and example.  It’s certainly an amazing achievement.  Is it a better all-around vehicle than a Range Rover?  I don’t know (though the interior sure is), but it certainly leads in outright gee-whiz technology that we’ll see percolating down throughout the BMW and other manufacturers’ ranges for the next several years.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the car’s bonded carbon fiber body panels and other structural elements, which provide extreme strength with incredible lightness.  Look for those construction techniques and materials to be mainstreamed soon.)  As a marvel that shamelessly cossets while defying physics, and even providing on-demand silly fun, the big Bimmer is a thing of beauty and wonder.  And if it’s ultimately a bit digital for my tastes, that says way more about market segmentation (and my place in it) than what this car is about.

The 750i xDrive is an amazing achievement, full stop.  Now, where did they hide all the little people?

Rolling with The Chief

As it happens, I have parked in my garage two vehicles that illustrate as well as any the rapid evolutionary curve of the modern SUV.  In one bay sits my wife’s 2014 BMW X5 xDrive35d, nicknamed Axel, the current-generation, diesel-powered version of BMW’s tall-seating luxuro-barge.  It’s smooth as a 5-series, comfortable and cosseting, powerful and sure-footed, safe as a vault, a lovely technological tour de force with appealing gizmos galore.

In the bay next to Axel sits something altogether different, a beast from another age of SUV mindset, carved from ingots and giving not two shits to mealy concepts such as luxury or even particular comfort:  The Chief.

The Chief is a 2012 Toyota FJ Cruiser, the Trail Teams version (of which Toyota made 2500 that year), painted in blazing Radiant Red from running board to rooftop with the hard bits done up in anodized black.  It’s fitted with Bilstein shocks for an even more compliant off-road ride, burly 16-inch alloy wheels over massive and deeply treaded BFGoodrich rubber, slim rock rails and skid plates galore, with a TRD exhaust to give it more of a menacing bark.  It is not subtle.  And I love it.  Or I should say, we love it.  But more on that later.

The Chief handles the urban jungle with a shrug and a little grin.

The FJ Cruiser was an anachronism from the start.  Manufactured by Toyota in their Hamura, Japan, factory from 2006 to 2014, the FJ was originally designed as an homage to the rightly famous FJ40 utility vehicles that were manufactured for twenty-plus years beginning in the mid-1960’s.  The original FJ40 is well known, from the baked Africa plain to the frozen Alaska bush, for its toughness and durability, and continues to be a popular choice for vintage SUV buyers and well-heeled hipsters alike.  Even Icon, the California maker of amazing resto-mod 4x4s, has a stunning riff on the original FJ40 (for upwards of $100k, natch).  And the collector’s market has begun to inflate prices for pristine examples, with immaculately restored FJs sharing tony auction stages with Italian sports cars and Gilded-Age American classics at places such as Scottsdale, Monterey, and Amelia Island.

From those historical underpinnings Toyota rolled out the FJ Cruiser concept to much delight at the Detroit Auto Show in 2003, and in 2006 production vehicles began arriving in dealerships. Designed at Toyota’s Newport Beach, CA, Calty Design Studio, it was an adorable bulldog of a machine, with Tonka Truck styling and genuine capability to get itself into really nasty places (and then out again).  Grins and positive reviews followed in its wake. (Though a few reviewers complained about excessive body roll, missing the point of an off-road vehicle’s malleable suspension. Body roll in an FJ cruiser you say?  No kidding, Sherlock.) But while the vehicle was an immediate hit with hard-core fans and off-roaders and earned a somewhat awkward place in Toyota’s lineup, it yearly sales rarely exceeded more than 15,000 vehicles once the initial sugar rush of excitement wore off.  As expected, the vehicle was retired with the 2014 model year, another casualty of CAFE standards and fleet averages and softening tastes.

To Toyota’s credit, the FJ Cruiser was the farthest thing from the Costco-conquering Highlander or Sequoia.  Engineered as a body-on-frame vehicle and sharing many of it’s mechanicals with the equally old-school 4Runner SUV and Tacoma truck, the FJ stuck proudly to the pure 4x4 model rather than the electronically focused All-Wheel Drive system architecture that’s become so prevalent (take our X5 for example).  It’s got locking differentials, an actual low-end transfer case, and a rock-crawling sure-footedness found in few modern vehicles.  If you get yourself in a spot you can’t get out of in an FJ Cruiser, it’s your own damn fault.

The original FJ40 grill pops as a design element in the FJ Cruiser.

The FJ Cruiser is powered by a version of Toyota’s venerable 4-liter DOHC V6 making 260-hp and 271 lb/ft of torque, an engine used in variations across many of the Japanese firm’s beefy and durable SUVs and trucks.  It’s a great motor for the application, making peak power and torque at 5300rpm, and reasonable fuel efficiency given it’s powering 4300lbs of decidedly old-school construction (no aluminum or carbon fiber to be found).  The FJ will tow 5000lbs with ease, and the 5-speed automatic transmission on our model shifts smoothly and without drama.  It’s not speedy, with 0-60mph coming at a respectable but hardly urgent 7.8 seconds, and with lateral grip measured at .69 G, you’ll not be winning any auto-cross competitions in your FJ (though it makes a superb tow vehicle to get your tricked out Miata or Mini to the circuit).

But outright engine performance is not the raison d'être of a vehicle like this; going places other machines will not most certainly is.  To that end, the FJ Cruiser will ford 28-inches of water with little drama and approaches obstacles with over 30-degrees of approach and departure angles on the front and rear.  With a stock ground clearance of over 10-inches and with up to 10-inches of suspension travel on our Trail Teams Edition, the FJ will happily handle obstacles and climb terrain that would leave a hiker on foot wheezing for air.

Owning The Chief was not my idea.  Dreamy Wife, who has a penchant for colorful and whimsical vehicles, fell in love with the brute one afternoon and that was that.  She’d loved the FJ from the start, but when the one-off all-red version hit the market, we went shopping.  So we brought it home and she drove it for a couple of years and then decided she wanted to return to something a bit more posh, but when we talked about selling the FJ, it hit us both:  The Chief was a member of the family.  We had grown attached.

As a dog hauler and garden store companion, The Chief has seen more than it’s share of slobber and sweat and ground-in dirt.  But it was designed for that, so cleanup is simple and easy; no fitted rugs to worry about shampooing, just easy to wash, rugged plastic lining.  In the Winter, we don’t even pay attention to the roads.  We just go.  The Chief has rescued stranded motorcycles, pulled trailers of various shapes and sizes, towed several vehicles out of nasty spots, blasted 24” snow drifts, crawled over gravel piles, and lugged tons of rock and bags of sand and even a rare painting or two, and yet still manages to be useful on runs to the dry cleaners.  And while we’ve never made the trek out to Moab, we know we damn well could if we wanted.  And that’s a comfortable feeling; the Zombie Apocalypse could be just around the corner.

The ergonomics of an FJ Cruiser can leave a bit to be desired, but complaining about them seems petty, as it’s clear what you’re getting when you sign on the line.  The blind spots behind the C-pillars wouldn’t be out of place in a sensory deprivation chamber, so an owner quickly acquaints himself with the fine art of driving with the rear-view mirrors.  (The addition of a tiny backup camera on our year’s model alleviated the drama somewhat.)  And the two suicide half-doors look cool and function pretty well and provide wonderful access to the rear seats, but in tight spots it’s clear why rear hinges never really became mainstream.  Also, we’ve noticed the vehicle has a propensity to smell like wet dogs.  (Okay, maybe that’s just ours.)

And now the oddest thing:  Cost of ownership.  Vehicle depreciation curves tend to be as predictable as the tides and as steep as the lip of a canyon; as the saying goes, “That first step is a killer.”  Buying a new car generally introduces the buyer to a financial open elevator shaft of retained value (I’m talking to you, owners of Ford Fiestas and Fiat 500s).  But over the life of the vehicle, no single automobile in America has retained more value than the FJ Cruiser.  Let me repeat that:  The FJ Cruiser has the best resale of any vehicle sold in America.  (I’m not including limited production unobtainium hypercars like the Porsche 918 or McLaren P1, wisenheimers, so just don’t.)  JD Powers backs this up, as does NADA (the National Automobile Dealers Association).  Fun fact: A recent NADA report shows the average three-year-old FJ Cruiser is worth 98% of its original sale price.  98%!  Back in 2011 when we bought The Chief, we paid roughly $35,000.  To my utter amazement, there are significantly higher-mile versions of the same year and model trading on Cars.com at this very moment for north of that amount.  To quote a wise man: “Well I’ll be damned…”  Evidently not all depreciation curves are created equal.

Thus The Chief even turned out to be a great buy.  But really, that’s just a happy bonue in our household.  The Chief makes Dreamy Wife and I happy, period, full stop.  We always chuckle a bit when we see it’s bright red top poking above the inevitably shorter vehicles in whatever parking lot it's parked, and while it’s too tall to fit in my office parking garage, that’s no matter.  Ruscha and Rocco, our two German Shorthaired Pointers, love to ride around in it and consider it theirs.  It provides a feeling of solidity and invincibility in an increasingly fragile and disturbed world.  And it makes us smile goofy smiles.  And that, gentle readers, is an unquantifiable investment return if there ever was one.