New 2008 BMW 7-Series with facelift
At least that’s the conclusion most auto writers must make, since they were all so hot to damn the 2008 BMW 745i. So that you stay with us here, this is a car that has been completely redesigned and, most auto scribes said, was made to look less handsome than the last 7 series.
Based on all the flack the car drew for its unconventional hind end and its iDrive system made by Microsoft, you’d have thought that BMW had done something sacrilegious and reduced the horsepower screaming out of its V-8, or made the car handle less nimbly, steer more sloppily or accelerate more sluggishly.
Nope. None of that happened.
Said car writers were so busy slaying the styling and damning the computerized controls that they didn’t bother to tell you what you might actually want to know — that this car is better in every non-esthetically weighted category.
It’s faster, has more interior room and corners like a much lighter, smaller car. It changes gears like a manual even though it isn’t, and it stops so quickly your molars hurt from the g forces trying to pull them out of your mouth.
And guess what? Despite the unkind adjectives slung at the new $68,495 BMW 745i, the car is selling like Molson at an NHL game, surpassing Mercedes-Benz S-Class sales in its first quarter on the market.
We’re not surprised. See, we actually drove the car and will be happy to explain how it drives. And yes, we’ll weigh in on esthetics and iDrive as well — the latter uses a center console-mounted mouse and dash-mounted LED screen to activate more than 700 (!) onboard functions. And, darn it, after reading every auto writer whine about how they couldn’t figure out the radio controls, we can now a) tell the Luddites to put a sock in it, and b) see if there was more to this car than an oddly designed boot lid. Would we get away with our smugness? Keep clicking–we know you can use a mouse, and so does BMW.
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