It’s a known thing that luxury SUVs, despite their high ground clearance, are not exactly made with off-roading in mind. These are cars that will most often be used around town, in parking lots and for long road trips, for obvious reasons. And yet, when the BMW X7 was launched, the German company took journalists from around the world on an off-road course with the new luxury SUV, just to prove a point.
And that point was that the X7 is not afraid to get its underbelly dirty. Sure, owners will still not take it into the woods to keep up with a Wrangler on some God-forsaken trail, but it’s still interesting to see such an expensive vehicle being pushed to the absolute limit. That’s exactly what the guys from SUV Battle did in one of their videos, pitting the X7 against similar, luxurious models from other car makers in an off-road test.
The cars the X7 has to beat in this contest are the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Mercedes-Benz GLS 450, Lexus LX570, Infiniti QX80, Range Rover and Mercedes-Benz G-Class, in this case the G63 AMG model. Out of the entire line-up, the most relevant competitors are the GLS and the Range Rover. The other models at play are nice enough, of course, but few people would actually cross-shop between them.
The X7 at play here is a M50i model but it also has the off-road package which means it comes with various driving modes for driving off the beaten path as well as a locking differential on the real axle and, of course, an adjustable air suspension setup. Compared to its Mercedes-Benz rival or the Range Rover, the BMW showed less confidence off-road, but it still went through all the obstacles easily enough.
Nevertheless, the BMW was the second to last car to go on the trail, which had been roughed up by the other cars before it, so it had a harder course to cover overall.
