In the interest of being mindful about your time I will skip the usual annoyance about BMW grilles. I’m sure that you have your own personal collection of unflattering comparisons and similes. Quite frankly the only thing anyone needs to know about the opinions on this design is that there is now an aftermarket dedicated exclusively to fixing the grilles on the M3/M4
And BMW couldn’t care less, because they aren’t expecting you to buy it.
This article that you’re reading has been on the pipeline for a couple of weeks. It started life as the standard shrew of complaints one does with a new car. Specifically, the new BMW 7-Series. It does make it easy. BMW’s executive flagship has been treading water for a while. Here it is a car where you’re supposed to sit in the back, but whose parent company still trades in images of driving enjoyment and goodwill from legendary sports cars and supersedans. When Chris Bangle went ahead and added his own styling touch to the brand (which still looks ugly to me even after decades of normalization), it was on the 7-series. More prosaically, what would consume you to reject the Mercedes S-Class, which defines this class as much as the BMW M3 defines its own, and go for the 7-er instead?
This latest example does nothing to help its case. Oh sure, it now has a fully electric counterpart in the i7, which makes exactly the same power as the Hybrid V8 on the 760i. But…look at it. It reminds me of the more pathetic excesses of the 70s American auto industry in the worst way. No taut, purposeful design here; rather more just “BIG” sandwiched between a front and rear that rather seem to have come out of two different cars. And, of course, the grille is even larger. At this point BMW is that kid that you tell to be quiet for a second and they comply. At least, they do for long enough to sneak up on you as you’re on a meeting and then shout at the top of their lungs.
Don’t believe me? The grille surround is illuminated. At this point nobody is going to buy their stuff.
And that was the eureka moment. BMW doesn’t want you to buy a car off of them. It’d be nice for them if you did. But that’s not their market. Their market are those people that couldn’t care less about the grille, that think that having touchscreens on the rear doors (5.5", the same as an iPhone 8+), no door handles, and giant 8K TV is fun, the ones that couldn’t care less about the fact about how they’ll last in a long while, because the car isn’t going to be here for a long while.
Once the lease is over, it gets replaced with a new one because you’ve leased BMW’s for years and they always come with nifty stuff, your old 7-er goes to the CPO limbo for a while, and then it gets sold, to some poor schmuck whose going to have loads of fun trying to figure out how to tow it, or how much that 8k TV is going to run him. Not a nice place to be unless you’re collecting YouTube ad revenue from all of that suffering.
For everyone else, I guess it really makes more sense when you can lease a BMW 760i for $999/mo for 36 months.
