BMW 2 Series Grand Tourer 2015 Review

There is a groundswell of people out there who jumped up and down when the 2 Series Active Tourer arrived and they’ll jump even higher with this car. And they’ll keep jumping when the 1 Series goes front-drive.

Non-car people I talk to cannot believe BMW has built a people-mover and BMW can’t yet bring itself to admit it now has a player in the MPV segment, even though it clearly has a player in the MPV segment.

The 220d xDrive Grand Tourer (and its petrol-engined brethren) are just like the five-seat Active Tourer, but with more metal, more weight and more seats. And a more ungainly rear-end design.

While we also had a punt in the 220i petrol version, the 220d is clearly the pick of the range, even if it’s the most expensive and only comes with all-wheel drive and eight-speed automatic gearbox.

Even in comparison to the 2 Series Active Tourer, then, the 220d xDrive Grand Tourer is the least driver-focused BMW ever built for production. There might be a good reason for that, with BMW insisting this is where an important slice of their customers are heading. Then again, there might be significant reasons why Audi and Mercedes-Benz have ignored this kind of thing.

There is practicality here – in abundance – for those who want it. The 4556mm-long body is 214mm longer than the Active Tourer and its 2780mm wheelbase adds 110mm to the tauter sibling. What you end up with is a longer rear door and about 100mm more rear overhang, which is precisely how the bustle-butted Grand Tourer looks.

What BMW has stuffed inside that body makes it interesting, even if driving it doesn’t. There are three rear seats, all of which are easy to get into and out of, and they can slide far enough forward (13cm) to boost the luggage space from 645 litres to 805 litres. They are split 40:20:40 and have adjustable backrests. They can carry three separate baby capsules and if that’s not enough, there are two seats in a third row that can be folded flat into the boot floor.

There are fold-down tray tables on the backs of the front seats, too, to help keep kids entertained or adults at work, and BMW has developed a myKIDIO app for the younger passengers. Initially available only in Germany, the app is designed to deliver content for children, like films, television shows and audio books for tablets, while the driver retains control of the content, which can be displayed on the multimedia screen on the dash.

There is also a bit more space inside it than the Active Tourer because BMW has made it 5cm taller and there’s now enough middle-row room for adults to sit cheerfully even on long drives. Well, two adults, anyway. The middle seat is still the short straw.

You can fit adults in the third-row seats, too, but by the time you move the middle row far enough forward to make that happen, you’re going to get complaints from there instead of the farthest pews. What you can’t do is fit adults in them for very long, given they lack head, leg and foot room. But for kids, they’re fine.

The middle row drops down at the push of an electronic button and the ultimate row folds also away easily and can be raised with one hand. The luggage area is easy to get to, with a low lip and a wide opening, and it can be stretched out to 1820 litres. If that’s not enough, you can score a 2.6-metre long stowage space by folding the front passenger seat flat.

There is leather everywhere up front and the plastics are generally of a high quality, though some of the switchgear is feeling a little clunky and dated.

The first thing you notice up front is that the materials are very, very convincing. With the sole exception of a cheap-to-touch lid over a secretive storage area beneath the air conditioning controls, everything looks classy, feels premium and works brilliantly well.

It’s a clear cut above the B-Class or Ford C-Max interior. There are those who felt the raised reflective glass-type head-up display isn’t cutting edge, but it’s easy to adjust in height and direction via the multi-media screen and the iDrive controller.

Its standard gear includes a 6.5-inch multimedia screen, a Bluetooth interface for hands-free conversations, radar cruise control, emergency braking and dual-zone climate control. And it’ll hold a full 1.5-litre water bottle in each front door pocket. There’s also DAB radio, satellite-navigation, an electronic tailgate, alloy wheels and standard city braking.

The front seats are about the most comfortable we’ve ever used in a BMW, even the 7 Series, so that tells you a lot about what kind of buyer BMW is targeting. The designers of those seats had an easier job, though, because it doesn’t exactly generate 7 Series-style cornering forces.

The most pressing need for the driver, though, hasn’t been delivered. BMW doesn’t yet have a blind-spot erasing camera or screen and the Grand Tourer desperately needs four of them. Its A-pillars might be split with a small triangular window, but they still take up a huge chunk of the driver’s 360-degree vision.

The B-pillars, by comparision, are outrageously enormous. Pulling out of any intersection that is slightly more or slightly less than a square 90 degrees is fraught with anxiety that something could emerge from the swathes of road you can’t see.

On the other hand, what you do get sometimes is a strobe-light effect from broken lane markings reflecting off the inner part of the leading A-pillar. It’s a bit odd and something BMW admitted it hadn’t come across before. The root cause is that BMW has this bit covered in plastic and the more experienced people mover makers (we’re thinking the Volkswagen Golf Sportsvan, the Ford C-Max and S-Max and Renault’s Grand Scenic) cover it in light-diffusing cloth instead.

As the first front-drive family production car from BMW carries gravitas, so it has expensive tailor-welded blanks throughout the body structure, a multi-link rear suspension, a stiff front subframe made from a high-strength steel, plus front struts with aluminium bearings.

The powertrains are all the same as they are in the smaller Active Tourer, so our 220d xDrive came with 140kW of power at 4000rpm and 400Nm of torque at 1750rpm from its 2.0 litres of four-cylinder turbocharged engine.

BMW suggests this is enough motor to get the big rig to 100km/h in 7.6 seconds, which is quicker than you’d think to look at it, and it has a 218km/h top speed. Which would be kind of fun to see.

The flip side is a set of fuel economy figures that are pretty impressive, including a combined NEDC figure of 4.9L/100km and CO2 emissions of 128g/km.

It’s something of a surprise that the entire thing weighs only 1565kg (DIN), until you find that BMW doesn’t quote a weight figure for the seven-seat version, just the five-seat Grand Tourer. And it’s so far been impossible to nail anybody down to find out the exact number the back row adds.

Still, whatever the figure, it adds enough to make the choice of the diesel worth every Newton-metre, as it’s living in the torque band that makes it a sensible option. The eight-speed auto slips through its gears cleanly and seamlessly and lets the boxiest BMW build up its head of steam quickly from the lights.

All the 220d models at the launch had the optional adaptive dampers and they do wonders for minimizing the roll from the tall body. The car got a bit floaty in its comfort setting, though that was easily the best option for broken ground and lumpy, untended streets.

Sport mode shone the best possible light on the Grand Tourer’s handling envelope and it showed very clearly that the front end was still surprisingly sharp (as it is in the Active Tourer), but there is so much mass and compromise behind it that the handling efforts became decidedly relaxed further back.

The car is virtually impossible to unsettle, though, and you can make it flow pretty nicely through a series of corners – but, then, you can do that in a Ford C-Max or a Volkswagen Golf Sportsvan, too, because they both punch above their weights.

While the cars rode on optional damping units, they also rode on optional 18-inch rubber, too. The stock 205/55 R17s work fine, we were told, but the 18s just looked better in pictures. We’ll wait and see on the first point but agree on the second.

The engine is strong enough in the real world for this kind of car – though we’d like to fill every seat with underfed motoring.com.au staffers (Sinkers will fit nicely in the rear) and give it another go. You can easily add another 600kg in Australian adults if you try.

There’s some noise from it, though not that much more than the four-cylinder petrol engine, to be honest. It’s smooth, too, and clean in the way it picks up its revs.

The most significant issue with driving it, like it was with the Active Tourer, is the road noise coming in to the cabin. The tyres deliver plenty of noise but the wind starts playing havoc around the A-pillars and mirrors as soon as speeds climb beyond about 80km/h. At 110km/h, they sound a bit louder than we’d hoped for.

The biggest problem the Grand Tourer seems to face is that it’s aiming for a buyer profile with a very specific wish list in a car. And most of them won’t be accustomed to the inside of a BMW dealership, and neither will BMW dealers by accustomed to talking to them.

Instead, there are all manner of SUV options for people wanting seven seats, even if they don’t all turn inside the Grand Tourer’s 11.7-metre turning circle. And while they might not be precisely as practical inside, they look a lot less compromised from the outside. Like, for example, the X5.

Which is why the Active Tourer is on sale here but the Grand Tourer remains “unconfirmed”.