There must be something in the water that Munich is brewing its beers with. Throughout the entirety of its 87-year automotive history, BMW has built its cars with drive sent to the rear, the foundation on which its reputation for producing the Ultimate Driving Machine stood for so long.
Despite toying around with a few prototypes, the company had always flat out refused to build a front-wheel drive car – even though its blasphemous four-wheel drive X line of SUVs have been around for close to two decades now. It's even made advertisements deriding the format, such was the contempt BMW held against it at the time.
Well, it's now time for it to have egg on its face – after announcing it to the world via a concept in 2013, BMW built its first front-wheel drive car with last year's 2 Series Active Tourer, with the next-generation 1 Series and front-biased X1 set to follow. Brand purists, fearing the news for quite some time now, must have run amok, I'm sure, so can you imagine the look on their faces when they got wind of the news that BMW was also building – shock, horror! – a seven-seater multi-purpose vehicle?
That would be the car in these pictures – the new F46 BMW 2 Series Gran Tourer, ready to fight such worthy machines as the Ford S-Max and Volkswagen Touran (Mercedes-Benz, whose B-Class the 2 AT now competes, simply thumbed its nose at the seven-seat idea and said, "no, thanks"). It may be practical, but shorn of an ideal front-engined, rear-driven layout, can it retain the trademark driving precision BMWs are known for, or will it fall flat on its face?
Find out how the F46 BMW 2 Series Gran Tourer drives here
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