Today, the BMW X7 is more or less considered just another BMW in the lineup. But, as it turns out, long before the idea of a full-size BMW SUV seemed plausible, let alone profitable, designers in California were sketching away. Early drawings reveal a truth that rewrites the X7’s origin story. By the time it finally debuted in 2018, BMW had already been fine-tuning the design for nearly 20 years. What took so long? And why did the company hesitate to build a vehicle that now feels like a natural pillar of the lineup?
The BMW X7: 20 Years Old by the Time it Debuted (Kind of)
At the design roundtable where we learned more about Designworks, the California studio that helped design the X5 (and many other vehicles), we also got more inside knowledge about how BMW’s largest SUV came to life. Sketches — which we unfortunately can’t share with you here — dated back as far as the year 2000, around the time the BMW X5 was still fresh to the market. Remarkably, it would take around 18 years for the SUV to become a reality.
And becoming a reality at all wasn’t a given, despite the extremely long gestation period. Later, Adrian van Hooydonk gives us a glimpse of how the BMW X7 wasn’t immediately a popular topic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the pushback came from Munich-based execs. “The X7 took a little bit longer for the company to believe in, not here in America, but in Munich,” he says. Munich had a hard time believing that a car “that big, in Europe, could actually be part of the BMW brand.”
He goes on to say that, at least at the time, conventional thinking seemed to be that BMW simply would not sell the X7 in Europe at all. Obviously, enough change of heart occurred that BMW of course did introduce the BMW X7 globally. “Now, everybody agrees it’s normal,” van Hooydonk says. “It’s actually not bigger than a Range Rover, and it’s selling rather well around the world.”
The BMW X7’s Origins Tell a Story of BMW Design
Predictably, telling us all about the BMW X7’s odds-defying birth was also illustrating a point. In this case, that point being what role design plays at BMW. “Our job is to help the company believe,” he says. “Sometimes we just have to create a model, put it out there next to existing cars, then present that, and then people can begin to understand them.” Of course, as we learned last month, the BMW X7 development origin story goes so much deeper than just good design. But maybe we would’ve been waiting even longer without it.
