Maybe April Fools is a few months late in Germany?
This is not happening. There are no plans to put this into production - just an experiment that resulted from BMW giving a group of their vocational trainees in Munich some time, freedom, and access to their in-house engineers and model creation resources.
For some reason, the group figured the best use of this opportunity was to scrape out a ute-like cargo bed from the shell of an X7 SUV. Such a strange and obtuse impulse to pursue, perhaps wilfully ill-conceived as it no doubt would be a strange vehicle that emerges.
When we let our minds wander to a possible BMW-badged competitor to the Mercedes-Benz X-Class or Volkswagen Amarok, this is furthest vision that would come into focus. A Frankenstein’s Monster of pick-ups, gussied with a fancy teak panel bed floor, just pleading to be compared to a yacht’s deck. Nope.
BMW, if you want a piece of that pick-up action, just ask your pals at Toyota to use repurpose the HiLux for your own ends. Maybe throw in one of your 3.0-litre quad-turbo inline-6 diesel engines while you’re at it. And don’t forget to ask nicely.
Built in Spartanburg, North Carolina, as that’s the only facility that produces the X7, this one-off Pick-up Concept is based from a the range-topping M50i variant and took 10 months to conceive, gestate, and produce. With the tray up, vehicle now measures 100mm longer than a standard X7 with its wagon body.
To accommodate the rear deck and the revised rear end, BMW constructed the custom panels from carbon fibre reinforced plastic. Even its rear doors had to be made of CFRP as the standard ones would not fit after the C-pillar was altered. Wonder what their accountants thought of all this...
Tray down, the load area is extended from 1,400mm to 2,000mm, allowing it to carry a Motorrad bike on the back. Just barely. Then again, with the bike mounted, there’s every chance the precious wooden floor will be damaged and, unless meticulously secured, that bike will just fall off if too much of its 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 is summoned at once. Nice. Such wow, much useful.
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