Since Karl Benz himself was in lederhosen, Mercedes has built the world’s best luxury saloon. Can BMW finally upset the Apfelkarren?
WORDS OLLIE MARRIAGE PHOTOGRAPHY MARK RICCIONI
DRIV
It’s got a face on it, the BMW i7. Iron Man’s face. Narrowed eyes in an impassive metal mask bleak and tough enough to batter through brick walls. Handy, in a pursuit situation. It comes across not so much a luxury car as a modernist object. Rolling architecture, a mobile monument to controversy. You don’t even notice the grille. In M Sport guise it’s been absorbed into a mouthy morass that incorporates a full width biker’s tache.
It’s the anti S-Class. Finally. At long last. I mean how many years, decades, has it taken BMW, Audi et al to realise that mimicry doesn’t work? That merely copying the S-Class, the plutocrat’s totem-in-chief, isn’t enough? OK, BMW has done controversial before. The 2001 7-Series was a square, chiselled Bangle block. That was the car that introduced iDrive to the world, and set the tone for all in-car infotainment until the touchscreen came along. Its influence was massive, but despite that it was never a better car than the S-Class.
The new one is. Genuinely. Game given away early, but the trad car classes rarely relinquish their idols; these are sectors built and shaped around the cars that have come to symbolise them – the Golf, Range Rover, BMW 3-Series. And yes, the Merc S-Class. Toppling one almost never happens (the Golf scuttled itself). Because you don’t build a better car by copying it.
So how has BMW done it? It has nothing to do with the i7’s electric drive. OK, little to do with it. Twin motors drawing discreetly from a 101kWh battery provide plentiful surge, but that’s not the point. The throttle calibration is immaculate. You want to crawl in traffic? Done. Surge past slower traffic? Done. Park? Done. And done with such precision and diligence that you never think about it.
Mercedes doesn’t do an electric S-Class. The all-electric EQS lurks in a different, curious realm. For the driver, not the driven, a car with an indistinct personality and role. So here we have an S580e. And provided you never push it too hard it’s within an inch of being as smooth and silent as the BMW. The in-line turbocharged six is largely undetectable, just a hint of background vibration. Unless you let the revs climb. Above 4,000rpm there’s a thin rasp that doesn’t suit the S-Class’s refined demeanour. But t
