It was lucky that the BMW 740 Ld M Sport comes with the xDrive all-wheel drive system.

 
Neil Lyndon and family get comfy in the BMW 740Ld xDrive M Sport Saloon
 
On the day it was delivered to our house in Scotland, the heaviest snows for seven winters were falling. Without four-wheel drive, a car 5.238m long, weighing 1900kg and standing on 20” wheels and ultra low-profile tyres that are a foot wide wasn’t going to turn any one of the five spokes on its breathtakingly expensive wheels. Add to those figures the facts that this car puts out 320 bhp and a torrent of torque that runs to 680 Nm through an eight-speed automatic gearbox and you might begin to get the picture that a battery of driving aids would be required to get this monster moving in snow.

The supply of driving aids, however, is precisely the feature in which the 7 Series excels above all other cars presently on sale. Having failed for generations to beat the Mercedes S-Class in the luxobarge category, BMW threw all their resources, all their engineering wizardry and every gizmo they could conceive at the new 7 Series and then they went out and got a hi-tech kitchen sink and threw that, too.

A week’s loan is absurdly too short a time in which to learn all the complexities of a car whose remote key fob alone carries more computing power than NASA had at their disposal to send man to the moon.

After taking my daughter and her friend to school every morning in the lounge luxury seating at the back of this 740, they finally- this very morning – worked out not only how to heat and recline the seats and connect to the internet through the wifi hotspot but how to stream You Tube from their phones onto the screens behind the front seats. When I told them this was the last time they would travel in such majesty, they nearly wept.