BMW Remains Open to Building an Even Bigger SUV Than the X7

There’s no question that here in the United States we looove our big vehicles, especially SUVs. If you’re Chevy, Ford, Lincoln, Cadillac, Nissan, or Toyota, you already have something in your lineup designed to satisfy our insatiable need to go bigger. If you’re BMW, not as much. For now at least.

As with most other automakers, BMW has seen great success in the U.S. market with its bigger SUV offerings, the X5 and X7. The X7 three-row luxury SUV is currently the largest vehicle BMW sells, but it seems as though the company is open to the idea of building and selling something even bigger than that.

In a roundtable discussion in Munich, Germany, last week, senior vice president of BMW brand and product management, Bernd Koerber, acknowledged that the automaker has been exploring the possibility of a model bigger than the X7, but made no guarantees or promises that it would move forward with anything just yet.

“It’s still the question of whether that’s the right thing for us to do,” he said. “Probably BMW could do something that will work in that segment. I would also say yes, why not? Because we were very successful [with] X5 [and] X7. That segment is 80, 90 percent U.S. and 10 percent Middle East, more or less. Inherently, we would also like to look into something that works globally. [The bigger SUV] would be something very U.S.-specific, but that there’s a segment there: Yes, we could offer something that would fit the brand and the segment. That does not mean automatically that it will happen.”

These remarks come after the head of the BMW National Dealer Forum told Automotive News in January that he could see a model along the lines of the Infiniti QX80, Cadillac Escalade, and Lincoln Navigator do very well here. If, and it’s a very big if, an SUV like that were to happen, it might wear the X9 moniker.

There’s some online chatter about an X9, but certainly nothing set in stone. But we see where the dealers are coming from. Though the X7 is indeed very large, its third row and trunk space remain on the tight side for the segment. It doesn’t offer Escalade-levels of do-everything-ness, which is generally what U.S. buyers expect from their full-size vehicles.

If BMW does move forward with an SUV bigger than the X7, we can’t imagine it would be able to sell it in European markets where smaller roads make massive SUVs less practical. But in the Middle East, China, and here? No problem. It remains to be seen, however, if an even-bigger BMW SUV will be too much of a problem for the automaker to actually build.