The Electric BMW i7: A Study in Distraction As I stood in front of the BMW i7, I couldn't help but think of a chimera. The battery-electric BMW 7-series gets a lot of flack, and all deserved, for its monstrous fascia. Anchored by optionally illuminated flared nostrils that resemble a saiga antelope's, bounded by the drooling buccal marionette lines of a bloodhound, capped by the pinched double eyes of a box jellyfish, and underpinned by the mustache of a whale, it resembles something hallucinated by a committee of AI resurrection biologists. But the i7's abhorrent prow is really just a distraction from its repellent overall proportions. Its high hood and beltline, crushed roof, and expansive rounded flanks give it a humiliatingly leaden corpulence, like a steamroller caught pausing to cop a squat. The ever-taller hoods and grilles on pickups and SUVs are fundamentally just cargo-cult mimicry of semi trucks. The ...
The Electric BMW i7: A Study in Distraction
As I stood in front of the BMW i7, I couldn’t help but think of a chimera. The battery-electric BMW 7-series gets a lot of flack, and all deserved, for its monstrous fascia. Anchored by optionally illuminated flared nostrils that resemble a saiga antelope’s, bounded by the drooling buccal marionette lines of a bloodhound, capped by the pinched double eyes of a box jellyfish, and underpinned by the mustache of a whale, it resembles something hallucinated by a committee of AI resurrection biologists. But the i7’s abhorrent prow is really just a distraction from its repellent overall proportions.
Its high hood and beltline, crushed roof, and expansive rounded flanks give it a humiliatingly leaden corpulence, like a steamroller caught pausing to cop a squat. The ever-taller hoods and grilles on pickups and SUVs are fundamentally just cargo-cult mimicry of semi trucks. The growth of the crossover market is “a reaction to the growth in the truck and SUV market, where if you’re driving around in a car, you just feel like people can’t see you.”
The fear is real enough to cause drivers to re-interpret vehicle proportions. “The greater their fear of heights, the more they overestimated the distance,” says Dennis Proffitt, PhD, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Virginia, who specializes in visual perception. “You have a prototype about what cars should look like based upon the cars you experience every day, so what you will notice will be the differences.”
A ubiquitous Mercedes-Benz S-class may be over a foot longer than a Lucid Air, but the Air looks big because its flattened squircle shape, elongated greenhouse, and blunted front and rear fascias are outside our prototype. The art is in knowing what will surprise and delight people, as opposed to just surprise people. “You don’t want to make drastic modifications, or you end up with something like the Tesla Cybertruck. And you don’t want to do that. The Cybertruck is terrible.”
The BMW i7, on the other hand, is a study in distraction. Its proportions are a mess, a jumbled mess of angles and lines that fail to create a cohesive whole. But perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps the point is to create a car that’s so busy, so overwhelming, that it becomes a distraction from its own flaws.
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