The Big test:luxury barges

Since Karl Benz himself was in lederhosen, Mercedes has built the world's best luxury saloon. Can BMW finally upset the Apfelkarren?

-  OLLIE MARRIAGE 

It’s got a face on it, the BMW i7. Iron Man’s face. Narrowed eyes in an impassive metal mask bleak and tough enough to batter through brick walls. Handy, in a pursuit situation.

It comes across not so much a luxury car as a modernist object. Rolling architecture, a mobile monument to controversy. You don’t even notice the grille. In M Sport guise it’s been absorbed into a mouthy morass that incorporates a full width biker’s tache.

It’s the anti S-Class. Finally. At long last. I mean how many years, decades, has it taken BMW, Audi et al to realise that mimicry doesn’t work? That merely copying the S-Class, the plutocrat’s totem-in-chief, isn’t enough? OK, BMW has done controversial before. The 2001 7-Series was a square, chiselled Bangle block. That was the car that introduced iDrive to the world, and set the tone for all in-car infotainment until the touchscreen came along. Its influence was massive, but despite that it was never a better car than the S-Class.

The new one is. Genuinely. Game given away early, but the trad car classes rarely relinquish their idols; these are sectors built and shaped around the cars that have come to symbolise them – the Golf, Range Rover, BMW 3-Series. And yes, the Merc S-Class. Toppling one almost never happens (the Golf scuttled itself). Because you don’t build a better car by copying it.