BMW 6 Series Gran Coupe Review

The 6-Series Gran Coupe is like a play: it includes many roles and so it depends which character’s point of view you use when describing its comfort.

The car is the closest in size to the 7-Series, but it’s pretty far from BMW’s flagship sedan in terms of comfort. It borrows its mask from the 6-Series Coupe, which it’s close to as far as this chapter is concerned, adding a rear area comfort bonus.

We’ll start from our bodies down: the optional Comfort front seats are a must have (their cooling function is not), as the multitude of adjustments makes sure one quickly finds a comfortable position for any kind of travel. They might seem a tad on the firm side at first contact, but when you use them for long trips, you notice that they’re excellent.

The added interior space also offers a comfort bonus for the front passengers, while the rear ones will enjoy what those in most coupes only dream of: enough space to please both the body and the mind.

As for the soundproofing, this is balanced: beefy enough to turn the car into a GT, but without killing all the fun during fast driving. However, if you get close to the top speed, you’ll hear a strange wind noise in the superior part of the cabin, which is probably due to the frameless windows.

The adaptive dampers allow the driver to be mild on the passengers, but we would’ve liked the car to be a bit smarter when it came to dealing with large road caprices. Of course there’s also a ton of electronics, all designed to make life on board more pleasant. All in all, the Gran Coupe turns to be a good Grand Tourer.

You don't need an university degree in automotive design to notice that the 6-Series Gran Coupe look absolutely stunning. However, an automotive engineer will tell you that the looks are not the most impressive side of this car - this title goes to its technical versatility.

With the 6-Series Gran Coupe, BMW invented yet another use for it's large vehicle platform, which has been featured, with the required adjustments, for models ranging from the BMW 5-Series and 5-Series GT, though the 6-Series Coupe and Convertible and to the 7-Series and even the Rolls-Royce Ghost.

Under the long bonnet, which, by the way, pops up if you happen to meet someone... by accident, we get a choice of three engines. The entry-level one is the N55 3.0-liter twin-turbo petrol unit, delivering 315 hp and 450 Nm (332 lb-ft) of torque.

For the next hand, BMW adds a pair of cylinders and places the cards in a “V” - we’re talking about the brilliant N63 twin-turbo 4.4-liter powerplant, which will get some extra tech goodies, compared to the 407 hp version we drove on the coupe, in order to deliver 444 hp and a peak torque of 649 Nm (479 lb-ft). This unit cand power the rear or both axles.

There will also be an M-badged 6-Series Gran Coupe, which will borrow the S63 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 from the M5, so you’ll end up with the stunning looks mated to 560 hp and 678 Nm (500 lb-ft) of torque.

Well, despite all this petrol power talk, we chose to test drive the N57 3.0-liter twin-turbo diesel unit, all because this promised to place 313 hp and 630 Nm (464 lb-ft) of torque at the mercy of our right foot, all with the efficiency of a compact - and we’re back to the versatility asset we mentioned in the opening paragraph.

The latter isn’t just a promise, it’s based on a lot of cogs and wires. First, we have the standard eight-speed automatic gearbox, which uses long ratios (the eight-gear ratio sits at 0.67:1, while the final drive sits at 2.81:1) and then there’s the EfficientDynamics technology, which brings goodies such as braking energy recuperation and a start-stop function.

Our test car had also been gifted with the Adaptive Drive active dampers, as well as with the the Dynamic Drive, active stabilizer bars, but we’ll talk more about these in the “Open Road” chapter.

Disclaimer: the following six gran paragraphs are destined for narcissists. You might also enjoy them if you’re not so self-loving, but we just wanted to warn you.

Each year, certain independent sources publish a top of the most sought-after automotive colors, but when it comes to the world of exotic and fine cars, you don’t need to do any research to find out what’s hot at the moment - it’s simple: matte finishes. The aftermarket world pays special attention to this kind of finish, but having your car wrapped in not nearly as good as getting it painted in a matte color from the beginning.

BMW has always had a keen eye for features that appeal to tuffs and bad boys and thus the company couldn’t miss the matte train. In BMW language, this is called “Frozen finish” and the carmaker offers a range of such colors a few select models. There’s also an exception, the Frozen Red M3 Performance Edition (this is destined for the British market), which is actually a wrap.

Well, our test car had the privilege to be included on that list of select models we were talking about above, being dressed in Frozen Bronze Metallic. What BMW does is basically use silicates in clear-coat finish, which serves as a matting agent for the paint. The resulting finish has a certain glossy finish, being somewhere halfway between a matte wrap and a standard glossy paint. One word description? Breathtaking.

And no, you don’t have to hold your breath while the car is being washed, as BMW assures us that the finish won’t develop a shine over the years of washing. However, the Frozen paint does come with certain drawbacks: you should avoid using wax and you can’t polish it.

The carmaker claims that if you do happen to scratch a certain area, this can be retouched, without the entire panel having to be re-sprayed in order to obtain a homogenous effect.

Having your Gran Coupe dipped in Frozen Bronze Metallic comes with a financial toll of EUR8,500 (USD10,760 at the current exchange rate), about EUR6,000 (USD7,600) over what you’d pay for a metallic finish.

Going past the exterior finish of the car (it’s hard to do this, trust us), we find a BMW Individual composition interior ,which brings exusiti materials such as Alcantara to the cabin, albeit not in the most tasteful color mix in the case of our test car.

The list of other toys that are worth their asking price includes the Comfort front seats, which are heated and ventilated (this is an extra-option), the Surround View camera that you really couldn’t survive without, the head-up display, which boosts both driving pleasure and safety, the Professional navigation system, as well as the Bang and Olufsen surround sound system, which is like a box full of concert tickets.

As you’ve noticed, we haven’t mentioned the full LED headlights and fog lights, as we’ll talk about these in the Safety chapter. Our test car was also gifted with other optional extras, which you can easily live without, such as automatic door closing system, the ambient lighting, the high beam assistant and the vocal command system.

Just like in the case of the F13 6-Series Coupe we drove last year, the F06 Gran Coupe is still a virgin as far as crash tests are concerned, so we’ll again check out the F10 5-Series’ Euro NCAP results, as this is the closest tested model.

Not many cars manage to impress the people at Euro NCAP to the point where they receive an almost 100 percent safety rating, but the new 5er was one of them. It got a five-star rating hiding a 95 percent score for adult occupant protection, 83 percent for child occupant protection, 78 percent for pedestrian protection and a score of 100 for the safety assist.

This time, we don’t have the same handling composure and the xDrive AWD system and the difference can be felt, but the car still feels safe to drive.

We want to move on to the active safety and talk about the full LED headlights and fog lights. While these offer illumination that rivals that of a good pair of Xenons, they might come with a few bugs, as the technology is still new – we did experience a brief moment of intensity reduction during a sudden brake and no, it wasn’t the high beam assistant, which, by the way, isn’t all that useful in the real world.

Thus, you can go for the optional LED headlights only if you seek the image bonus offered by them, otherwise you’ll be just as fine with the Xenon lights. However, the LED fog lights turned out to be great, as they really widened the field of light when they were on.

We’ll end this chapter by talking about something that might seem silly, but certainly isn’t: a comparison between rear-wheel drive and xDrive. While the latter is obviously safer in normal driving, when the person behind the wheel wants to send the DTC and DSC to sleep and have some tail-out fun, the rear-wheel drive actually becomes safer.

You see, despite the xDrive’s rear bias, which makes it extremely fun, if you want to get the tail out in a car fitted with it, you’ll have to push it considerably harder than in one with rear-wheel drive and it’s much more difficult to correct an error at that level. However, this kind of driving is only prefered by a very small audience, so it's not that important in the big picture.

The 6-Series Gran Coupe is closer to the 7-Series in terms of length and to the 6-Series in terms of feeling and, more importantly, it feels like a proper coupe, not sedan that put a tuxedo on.

The proportions and the details are not just right, they’re bewildering and looking at this car is like dreaming – it’s certainly got what it takes to throw the glove to Mercedes’ CLS and Porsche’s Panamera. The proof came during our test drive, when absolutely everybody that was in the proximity of the car offered it attention, with the only thing that separated a little girl from a BMW owner, for example, being the amount of time dedicated to contemplating the styling cues.

The design story has a happy ending inside the car, where the rear passangers won’t believe they’re in a coupe (the access is the only area that pays tribute to the swooping roof line) and the extra space also makes the front passengers feel better.

You’ll be having serious trust issues with your passengers also in terms of acceleration: try to abuse the throttle with the sound system off and see if they’ll believe you that it’s a diesel. BMW’s twin-turbo straight six oil burner is so good that you might try to put petrol in on the rare occasions when you visit the pump. And speaking of the financial side of the deal, we have to tell you that out test car, which was pretty loaded with features, came with a price of EUR125,900 (USD159,450), out of which the optional goodies weighed EUR 39,980 (USD50,630).

This car is flexibility at its best, not only thanks to the 1,000 faces its powertrain has to offer, but also because it brings a new personality to a platform that serves cars ranging from the 5-Series to the Rolls Royce Ghost.

Do you know anybody that looks stunning, is extremely smart and bold and doesn’t take advantage of this? We don’t, which means that the 6-Series Gran Coupe also does this. The vehicle is far from perfect, as its suspension could reach even higher ends of the adjustability scale (it could be a bit more comfortable and deal with high speed body roll better) and its visibility brings serious issues inside the city, but it has so many redeeming features that you learn to live with these drawbacks.

The Gran Coupe brings out both the sadist (the car dominates the others through its road presence) and the masochist (you accept its caprices thanks to its beauty and power) inside of you. Let's put it another way: it is evolution.