Today, the BMW X7 is considered more or less just another BMW on offer. But as it turns out, designers in California began drawing up sketches long before the idea of a full-size BMW SUV seemed plausible or even viable. Early drawings reveal a truth that rewrites the X7’s origin story. When it finally hit the market in 2018, BMW had already been fine-tuning the design for almost 20 years. What took so long? And why was the company hesitant to build a vehicle that now feels like a natural pillar of the lineup?
The BMW X7: 20 years old when it came out (so to speak)
At the design roundtable, we learned more about Designworks, the California studio that helped design the Sketches – which we unfortunately cannot provide you with here – go back to the year 2000, around the time when the BMW X5 was still fresh on the market. What’s notable is that it would take about 18 years for the SUV to become a reality.
And despite the extremely long gestation period, it was not a given that it would become a reality at all. Later, Adrian van Hooydonk gives us an insight into how the BMW X7 wasn’t immediately a popular topic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the resistance came from Munich executives. “It took a little longer for the company to believe in the X7, not here in America, but in Munich,” he says. Munich could hardly believe that “a car this big in Europe could actually be part of the BMW brand.”
He goes on to say that the conventional wisdom, at least at the time, was that BMW simply wouldn’t sell the X7 in Europe at all. Apparently there was such a change of heart that BMW naturally introduced the BMW X7 worldwide. “Now everyone agrees that it’s normal,” says van Hooydonk. “It’s actually no bigger than a Range Rover and sells quite well around the world.”
The origins of the BMW X7 tell a story of BMW design
As expected, the information that the BMW X7 fell victim to all odds also made a point clear. In this case it’s about the role design plays at BMW. “Our job is to help the company believe,” he says. “Sometimes we just need to create a model, put it next to existing cars and then present it and then people can start to understand it.” Of course, as we learned last month, the genesis of the BMW X7 goes much deeper than just good design. But perhaps without it we would have waited even longer.
