The all-electric, all-new, and almost entirely all-grille 2023 BMW i7 xDrive60 is finally available to configure on BMW’s Build Your Own configurator. Options are lavish, plentiful, and above all expensive – making it very easy (and fun!) to drive up the price on BMW’s newest EV. And considering it starts at $120,295 after destination, that’s kind of impressive. Anyway, here’s how I’d build my BMW i7 xDrive60.
Design
There’s two options for the exterior design – Luxury and M Sport. After adding M Sport, you can also add on the “M Sport Professional Package”, which nets you Extended Shadowline trim, black-painted calipers, and a useless little black spoiler on the rear decklid. The primary advantage of this package is that it blacks out the enormous grill and makes it look a bit smaller. It’s not a necessity, but I’d take it. Just like that, we’re up another $950.
Exterior
The BMW i7 xDrive60 gets an interesting color palette. Most of the colors are current favorites like Aventurin Red and Tanzanite Blue, but there’s also some new Frozen colors (Pure Grey and Deep Grey) and “Space Silver Metallic”, only available on the Luxury trim cars. I went with Carbon Black as it’s one of my favorites and one of the longest running colors in the BMW color wheel. All of the colors are a $0 add, except Dravit Grey and Tanzanite ($1950 each) and the Frozen colors ($5,000).
For wheels, I chose the standard M Sport 20” wheels – Style 907 – with performance tires. There’s a couple of other options ranging from 19”-21”, and there’s no estimated impact on range. I think the Style 907s will deliver close to the promised “around 300” miles of range and look pretty good. The 19s are only available on Luxury trim cars. 21” wheels are available at a flat $1,300 charge, regardless of style.
Interior
The extravagant cabin of the BMW i7 offers a lot of different options. Choose between Extended and Full Merino Leather options, and then pick your color. I chose the Black/Atlas Grey option – not available in Full Merino Leather. I’m a sucker for two-tone interiors and the Black/Atlas Grey does a great job of balancing the Carbon Black exterior. Full Merino Leather will set you back $5,450 and a special Smoke White interior with cashmere inlays commands $6,300. Other colors include Amarone, Tartufo, and black.
There’s five choices for interior trim – and it’s an important choice. It seems to cover a lot more of the dashboard, so you’re going to be seeing a lot of it. I opted for the Carbon Fiber trim – an obvious choice in an M Sport car, I feel – but the other wood trims are beautiful. Of particular note is the Oak trim – it gives the dash and almost marble appearance.
Options
The real draw point on the BMW i7 xDrive60 is the options list – it runs long, and none of it is cheap. I’m not going to cover everything here, but I will touch on the high points. The two-tone paint schemes you saw at launch are available for the princely sum of $12,000. The good news?
The BMW Theater Screen seems like kind of a bargain, relatively speaking – just $4750. There are some familiar options here, too – Bowers and Wilkins Diamond Surround is here for $4800, and Driving Assistance Professional turns up at $2100. Lastly, the Executive Package ($6650) contains the equally preposterous “Crystal Headlights” and “Automatic Doors”. They both are exactly what their lofty names suggest.
The essentials? I checked off the Theater Screen ($4750), B&W ($4800), Climate Comfort Laminated Glass ($1300), and painted the brakes blue for no charge. Park Assist is a mandatory charge for some reason (but it’s not a bad deal at $900), bringing the total for options to a not inexpensive $11,750.
Parting Thoughts
So, my build ends up at $132,995 – considerably more than any contemporary 7 Series barring the BMW M760i or ALPINA B7 models. Even more impressive is that it’s not even close to being fully loaded – that doesn’t happen until right around $165,000. For those of us whose vaults are a little light on gold these days – the configurator for the non-EV G70 7 Series is live as well. The much less expensive 740i starts at a much more sensible $93,300 before destination and the V8-powered 760i xDrive starts at a nice “in-between” price of $113,600 before destination.
Which would you pick, and how would you build it?
