With truck and SUV sales soaring ahead of sedans, automakers are seeing a better bottom line in bigger and more luxurious offerings. And BMW inched closer to making its own truck a reality with the prototype X7 pickup.
Backed by top BMW concept vehicle creators, a group of the brand’s “vocational trainees” chopped up an X7 SUV. After 10 months of labor, the team unveiled a big, luxury, four-door pickup truck.
And the eye-popping creation debuted at BMW Motorrad Days last week. Here’s everything we know about the BMW X7 pickup truck.
BMW Pickup Truck
While BMW has brought us crazy pickup truck concepts in the past, they have all been design study concept vehicles only. The BMW X7 truck build, on the other hand, arose from a production vehicle and is fully operational to show car quality. It has a hybrid all-wheel-drive system, good for 340 horsepower and 31-plus mpg.
Sadly, the X7 pickup will never see production, according to BMW. While it would be fun to see one of these on the road, we don’t think BMW plans to enter the truck market anytime soon.
BMW X7 Pickup
The X7 stands as BMW’s most luxurious and largest SUV to date. And it is a truly large vehicle. For the X7 truck, the team stretched the body an additional 4 inches. This enables a 55-inch truck bed — 79 inches of room with the tailgate down.
The build team also managed to cut a lot of weight from the vehicle — although it is longer. To accomplish this, the brand used carbon fiber in the roof, rear doors, and rear lid. This amounted to a full 441 pounds of weight savings.
Meanwhile, the truck’s deep-blue color scheme and teakwood bed take inspiration from BMW’s yachting pursuits.
Off Road, on Road, or Both?
The X7 pickup should prove a capable off-road machine — that’s if you ever dared take it off the pavement. On road, of course, it makes a powerful, fuel-efficient, ever-luxurious behemoth.
To cap off its presentation, BMW tied the X7 concept in with one of its top adventure touring motorcycles, the BMW F 850 GS. It’s a machine that excels on the road but can tackle some pretty impressive off-road obstacles and routes.
For its debut at the BMW Motorrad Days, the X7 pickup showed off an F 850 GS motorcycle mounted in the bed. The concept’s two-level air suspension makes loading and unloading the bike a breeze. Unfortunately, protecting the hand-finished polished teakwood bed from the heavy bike’s center stand looks to be an afterthought. A simple piece of metal was laid on top of the wood to protect it from the bike.
So, where does BMW go from here? Other luxury automakers jumped into the truck market, like Mercedes; will BMW follow suit at some point? Only time will tell, but we doubt BMW’s truck future will look like this.
