200 MILES 265 MILES 300 MILES
First drives 300-mile testJourney’s end at the Trona
Pinnacles: as rugged and epic
as the X7 but considerably
less rectangular. Still, give it
another 10,000 years...I take a turn in roomy
row two. Vast legroom,
plus entertainment and
controls for sat-nav,
climate control and
multimedia.An accident on the
freeway means we’re
briefly rerouted onto the
historic Route 66. Few
kicks to be had on this
bleak stretch, though.the standard road-spec Pirellis deal with them just fine. Getting
stuck out here is inadvisable; rattlesnakes are common.
No rock in these parts is as big as, or less pointy than, the
gigantic boulder that appears ahead of us. Standing seven
storeys high, Giant Rock seems wholly incongruous, like some
kind of art installation, while clearly being entirely natural. It’s
been regarded as spiritually significant by Native Americans
for thousands of years, and has a bizarre recent history. In the
’30s, eccentric miner Frank Critzer used dynamite as he dug a
400 square-foot home for himself under the rock. Critzer was
a German immigrant and a radio enthusiast, both of which
made local authorities suspicious during the Second World
War, and he was killed by some of his dynamite in an incident
in 1942 while under investigation by the police. The rock was
unscathed in that fracas, but in the year 2000 part of it split off,
revealing a white granite interior.
Critzer’s friend George Van Tassel, a UFO enthusiast, built an
airfield nearby, and a building called the Integratron designed
to facilitate time travel. Once used by luminaries including
Integratron supporter Howard Hughes, the airfield fell into
disuse decades ago and has since been chewed up by the 4x4s,
buggies and dirt bikes that flock to the area.
Back onto terra firma and into the Lucerne Valley. Rolling
along at 55mph it feels as if you could get out and jog alongside,
partly because of the X7’s capsule-like refinement, partly the
sheer scale of this place. The valley floor stretches, spirit-level
flat and without interruption to the distant horizon, pointy and
snow-capped. California’s good at horizons. I’m struck by how
politely traffic springs out of the way to let us through, and then
remember the gigantic chrome grille up front and imagine how
imposing we must look to cars ahead. You send out a message
when you drive this car, whether you wish to or not.
Engage the optional Active Cruise Control and the distance
to the traffic ahead can be self-regulated by the front camera
and sensors. More than that, the X7 can also steer itself within a
lane, and bring itself to a halt and pull away in traffic. Covering
endless, numbing miles it’s easy to begin to rely on the system
to reduce fatigue, and so adeptly does the X7 look after its own
progress it’s hard not to become distracted and reliant upon it.
But you can’t, because the system can easily become flummoxed
when road markings get inconsistent.As we climb out of the valley, we chance upon a rarity in these
parts: some real corners. It’s a chance for the X7’s chassis to show
off. Suspension is by air springs on double wishbones at the
front and multi-link rear, with adaptive dampers and electric
anti-roll control, plus fluid-filled bushings (and M50d models
can also feature all-wheel steering). The result is a car that’s
spookily flat through corners and looks after itself remarkably
well for a big, 2.3-tonne car.
But it can only go so far in disguising its mass, and there’s
a slight disconnect in immediacy between the steering and
the body’s movements, especially in the suspension’s softest
Comfort setting. While the X7 handles very adeptly for its size,
and certainly compares favourably to, for example, a Range
Rover or a Volvo XC90, I still find myself yearning for something
lower and lighter as the road twists and turns.
Off the tarmac once more and onto what feels like the
surface of another planet. We’re at our final stop on the desert
weirdness tour, Trona Pinnacles, a few miles from Death Valley.
It’s an ethereal place. Once underwater, the dry Searles Lake
bed has left behind hundreds of pillars of calcium carbonate, a
few thousand years in the making. Parts of Planet of the Apes
and Star Trek V were filmed here; were it not for a beautifully
turned-out Airstream trailer parked on a plateau, we could be
on the other side of the universe.
The X7’s bodywork is streaked with dust, the windscreen
splattered with bugs, but it’s handled everything we’ve thrown
at it, some of it while driving itself. In Palm Springs it blended in
like a native. In the wilds of the desert it scrambled over gnarly
ruts and climbs like a lizard. And on the freeway it covered miles
like an all-wheel-drive airliner – after the 300 miles of this story,
the BMW and I go on to cover another 700 or so, effortlessly. Big
car, big comfort, big appetite for miles. ⊲It’s spookily flat throughcorners and looks afteritself remarkably well for a2.3-tonne carOptional 22s look
the real deal but
upset ride quality
on some surfacesMAY 2019 | CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK 39