So I'm at Carmax looking at cars for the wifey and I'm telling the salesman that I'm going to miss the A8 and that I've been considering ditching my BMW for a luxo-barge. Right now you're saying "Mike, you just made a post last week saying that you were considering ditching your car for a Tesla and a slew of other cars" to which I say at any given moment I'm considering replacing one or both of my cars with something else. It's just a constant trickle of "what do I want next" that rolls through my head.
Bill Clinton used to get caught giving different answers to the same questions and people thought he was disingenuous because of it but I heard someone close to him offer a different take. They said that you could ask him a question Tuesday and he'd give you one answer and ask him the same question Wednesday and he'd give you a completely different answer and both were genuinely what he felt at that given point in time. That's how my brain works. My wife asks me how a top looks and I'll be like "It looks like crap" and she'll tell me that I told her a week ago that it looked great but I probably legitimately thought it looked great when I told her that and I most certainly think it looks like crap now. You see? No? Well it doesn't matter. Let's move on.
So the salesman asked me what I was looking at and I told him it would be between a 2011+ A8L and a 2010+ 750li. I made it clear that I wasn't interested in the specific cars they had on the lot and he made it clear that he didn't care. Few people took those cars out and it was a slow day so let's go for a ride. Great!
So we found the cars: a 2011 A8L which I've already reviewed here (http://www.thechicagogarage.com/for...1-audi-a8-official-toddler-mike-k-review.html) and a 2011 750Li M-Sport. I drove the Audi first because I wanted a direct comparison to my A8 and it was of course great. Fast enough, solid, sporty enough and amazing looking but this isn't about the A8 so let's dig in.
Exterior - The M-Sport version of the 7 series is about as aggressive styling as you can expect from a flagship car. People generally don't want the cars to look boy racerish. I happen to like the look of the car. It's still large and imposing but sporty looking. It feels like it's not going to age gracefully though.
Interior - This interior represents BMW's first real attempt to keep up with the likes of Audi. The 2002 - 2008 7 series had a painfully bad interior that featured a cold industrial design and hard plastics throughout. If you sat in a 2008 750 and that sat in a 2008 Audi A8 you'd think you were sitting in two completely different classes of car. The last generation A8 completely blew the last gen 7 series out of the water on the interior front.
So if we're comparing the current 7 series to the previous generation it's night and day. It bears almost no resemblance to the previous car's interior, has soft thick leather throughout and doesn't suffer from the over-abundance of buttons the previous 7 did. This interior is a nice place to spend some time. It's when you compare the 7 to it's current competition that it again falls short. The difference between this generation 7 series and this generation A8 is almost as drastic as the last generation. The attention to detail that the A8 has is missing here as is the build quality on some seemingly simple components such as the glovebox doors (don't align) and the center console tops which are loose and noisy. Relative to it's competition it suffers the same problem that my 5 series does: it's not bad. It's not built poorly or overtly bad looking. It's just that if you happen to see what it's up against you're likely to find yourself desiring more.
Drivetrain - I don't know what I was expecting here but it certainly wasn't what I got. First, some perspective: this is supposed to be the flagship car that the performance minded buyer gets. You want disconnected and luxurious? You go Mercedes. You want understeer and all wheel drive for less money? You go Audi. You want performance? BMW. This is the way it's always been. And so you'd expect an engine making 400hp and 450ft/ lbs to impress, even if it's tucked into a 4600lb body and it just fails to do that.
I don't know if it's turbo lag or torque management but the power in first gear comes on so slow that it ruins the car. It's not a fast car off the line by any means. In fact, the much less powerful (372hp/ 328 ft/lbs) 2011 A8L matches the BMW's 0-60 time of 5.2 seconds and falls just a few tenths short of it in the quarter mile. If that's not bad enough, the Audi returns 18 city/ 28 Highway efficiency whereas the BMW chugs it's way to 15/ 22. The numbers just don't match up and so what you end up with is this:
First gear, which should be where this car shines over the naturally aspirated A8, just lags. You can go all in it in first gear but you don't actually feel the power until it reaches second gear at which point it feels as if you've picked up 100 horsepower. If second gear feels like a 400hp car, first gear feels like you unplugged a couple spark plugs. Where the car does excel is passing. A rolling downshift provides a kick in the ass so hard you find yourself temporarily forgetting that you're driving a limousine. Midrange is this car's strong suit.
Handling - The 7 has something like five different modes that you can switch through that each affect throttle mapping, shift points, suspension firmness and more. The problem is that the car never finds a happy medium. It's either 70's Cadillac soft or canyon carving firm. Comfort mode results in a ride that's disconnected and wallows over imperfections in the road whereas if you go to the other side of the spectrum and select Sport+ mode it hunkers the car down so tight that it feels like an M5. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty cool that a car this large can feel this small but you don't buy a 7 series to be in sport mode all the time. In fact, this is where the smaller 5 series starts to make a compelling case for itself because the 7 series simply feels like a 5 series with compromises.
Sound & Tech - This car was equipped with the standard Harmon Kardon system that boasts subwoofers under each front seat. My complaint with the system in this car is not surprisingly the same complaint I have with it in my car: bass is not linear and the system doesn't really shine unless the volume is turned up. If you're listening to music at say 25% volume you're being assaulted by bass. It overwhelms the rest of the audio range and doesn't even out until you turn the volume up. So you find yourself constantly adjusting bass if you want to listen to talk radio (apparently I'm 80 years old) or don't want to listen to music at full blast. It's a small complaint for an otherwise very good system though.
Other than that there are a lot of cool gadgets you can get in this car. There's the 360 degree cameras that show you a birdseye view of your car so you can back into a spot without looking outside at all. Two front cameras allow you to peer around the front fenders if you're pulling out of an intersection with an obstructed view. Heads up display is awesome because we all know it's awesome and iDrive is finally as good as Audi's MMI if not *gasp* a bit better. There's a lot of stuff here to play with.
I do have one complaint though: BMW Apps. BMW Apps is an add-on that allows you to connect your iPhone to your BMW and open the BMW Connected app which will then use your phone's data connection to give you internet radio, Facebook access and a few other things. It's embarrassingly bad. Where do we start… First off, it only works on the iPhone. That HTC One you love? If you buy a BMW you should throw it away. Now that you got that iPhone you need to make sure that when it's connected to the car that the BMW app is always open. Close it and it disconnects. Take a call? It disconnects. In fact, you need to go into the phone's settings and set it so that it never locks because if the screen shuts off and the phone auto-locks after a minute, which lets face it… all of ours do, then… you guessed it: it disconnects. The only upside to this glaring deficiency is that BMW apps is so poorly implemented and useless that you won't miss anything by not using it at all. You'll just look at it and wonder how, how did that make it into a production car in 2010 and how are they still selling the same version of it in 2014?
Would I Buy It? - I wanted to say yes. In fact, I approached the car confident that I would like it more than the current A8 or that it would at the very least be on par with the A8 to the point where it's significantly lower second hand price would win me over. But it didn't. It's just not good enough. It does everything well enough but excels at nothing. It's not the best at being a straight luxury sedan and it's not the best at being a sporty yet comfortable flagship car. And that's a shame because well equipped examples are a lot cheaper than same year A8's and S550's. So sadly, would not buy.
What the car does do is it makes a compelling case for the smaller 5 series which is built on the 7 series frame. My 5 series is an amazing car but you wouldn't want most of it's traits in a 7 series because they're not why people buy a 7 series. Likewise with the newer cars. The 7 series has many of the traits of the 5 series which make for a great 5 series but a rather mediocre 7 series, at least in my opinion.
