After months of teasers and a slow drip of information, BMW today announced its new i7 xDrive60, the first all-electric version of its full-size luxury sedan. For $119,300 (plus destination fee), you’ll get a car with 536 horsepower and 549 lb-ft of torque that will get you from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds. Speed is capped at 149 mph and the company promises a range of up to 300 miles. Preorders start today, with a $1,500 deposit, and the U.S. launch is currently planned for Q4 2022.
The new 7 Series also marks the production debut of BMW’s 31.3-inch 8K Theater Screen with built-in Amazon Fire TV and touch screen remotes in the door panels. BMW first teased this at CES 2020. Content on Fire TV maxes out at 4K, but either way, that screen should keep your backseat drivers entertained for a while. You can move the screen within arm’s reach to use its touch controls, too, and when you’re done watching, it folds into the roof. Because there’s little BMW does in terms of sound that doesn’t involve Hans Zimmer, the whole folding and unfolding sequence also involves “a sound composition created exclusively for this purpose as part of the collaboration between the BMW Group and renowned film score composer and Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer.”
As for the electric drive features, BMW notes that the i7 xDrive60 is powered by its fifth-generation eDrive technology with integrated drive units at the front and rear axles. For the i7, BMW refined the existing adaptive recuperation feature from the iX and i4 to automatically optimize the brake energy regeneration based on upcoming downhill sections or the state of the traffic lights ahead of you (thanks to its built-in traffic light recognition function). Drivers can also manually choose the brake regeneration settings, and there is a mode that’s akin to one-pedal driving, too.
To extend the life of the batteries, the company tweaked the charging software to use a charging curve over the previous step settings it used in other models. “Following an initial, temperature-dependent phase of constant power supply, the new process now also controls charging based on a continuous nominal voltage curve that makes allowance for the variables of temperature, recharged capacity, and charge level at start of charging,” the company explains.
Talking about charging, the i7 xDrive60 will be able to AC power at up to 11 kW and DC power up to 195 kW. You should be able to charge to 80% in about 34 minutes at a DC fast charger, BMW says, and 10 minutes of DC fast charging will give you about 80 miles of range. Going from 0 to 100% on the battery will take about 10.5 hours on AC power.
