X7-based BMW pickup concept is the perfect way to transport your Beemer bike
For the 2019 edition of BMW’s annual Motorrad Days celebration of the firm’s two-wheel products, the company brought out a BMW F 850 GS adventure motorcycle—carried in the bed of a one-of-a-kind BMW X7 pickup truck. The one-off was fabricated by trainees at the BMW Group Vocational Training center in Munich.
The trainees turned BMW’s largest, most luxurious SUV into a 340-horsepower, all-wheel drive, five-passenger luxury pickup truck, in cooperation with the firm’s Concept Vehicle Construction and Model Technology divisions.
Milagros Caiña-Andree, Member of the Board for Human Resources of the BMW Group said, “I am pleased about the synergies between BMW Group Vocational Training, Concept Vehicle Construction and Model Technology, allowing these young talents to prove their abilities with such an extraordinary project.”
The X7 pick-’em-up has a handcrafted bed finished with highly polished teak wood, adjustable two-level air suspension, and hard metal handgrips and trim 3-D printed with a selective laser sintering process that sequentially fuses thin layers of powdered metal. The teak and Tanzanite Blue metallic exterior paint are said to be inspired by racing yachts.
The 56-inch-long bed can be extended up to 80 inches with the load-bearing tailgate opened. That tailgate, the rear doors, and the roof have been fabricated with carbon-fiber reinforced plastic, making the X7 truck 440 pounds lighter than the production X7 SUV, even though the pickup is four inches longer in overall length.
The concept is fully functional and street-legal, according to BMW, and it took about 10 months for a dozen trainees to complete. For sustainability and budget reasons, they started with a X7 used for testing that had been slated to be crushed. The team was chosen from employees training for the body and vehicle mechanics, vehicle mechatronics, and technical model construction work groups.
Currently, about 5000 BMW employees are undergoing training at nine BMW training facilities around the world. If they can come up with more crazy stuff like this, one brave executive might even give some pipe dream the green light.
