If your peepers stay wide open and your jaw drops, though, BMW design chief Chris Bangle's gamble has probably failed. Bangle's vision is to change the face of BMW, to broaden and sharpen the vocabulary of the 'form language'. His efforts so far - most notably the Z9 and X Coupe concepts and the 3-series Compact - show he has all the shock instinct of a budding Tarantino but without quite the lightness of touch. Some have suggested he's trying to pitch ugly as the new beautiful. If he can pull it off, the man's clearly a genius.

Prospects for BMW's new saloon flagship could be that finely poised. It's hardly love at first sight. Controversy has attached itself to the big car's massive complexity as well. There isn't nearly enough space here to roll out even half of the whole nine yards. What you need to know is the new Seven is a tech-fest of unprecedented proportions and harder to get to grips with than your average personal computer.

This despite BMW's iDrive concept which, promisingly, sounds like something those nice people at Apple Computers who make the iMac might have had a hand in. If only. iDrive is a control computer accessed by an every-which-way knob between the front seats. It does away with swathes of conventional switchgear and puts you in touch with 700 functions, 270 of which can be assigned to voice recognition. It isn't enough. Ploughing through the menus and sub-menus that appear prettily on the split widescreen display dominating the centre of the facia is laborious and distracting.

The good news is that BMW has come up with something called Dynamic Drive which is the Bavarian company's answer to Merc's ABC (active body control), and compensates for body roll through actuators in the anti-roll bars. DD works in conjunction with EDC-K electronically self-adjusting dampers and, if you've got the patience, you can configure all of this ί¿½ plus throttle response and the behaviour of the six-speed automatic transmission, in a kind of extreme 'sport' mode tailor-made for evo readers. What's more, all the systems talk to each other, so there's real synergy in the way they perform.
Excellence carries through to BMW's new 333bhp 4.4-litre V8 which powers the 745i and simply has to be the smoothest engine BMW has ever made. Whisper-quiet at low speeds, too, in keeping with the extraordinary levels of hush in the vast, plumply padded cabin. But undeniably potent. BMW claims 156mph and 0-60mph in 6.3sec. Not bad for something that's bigger than an S-class and weighs nearly two tonnes. And that's just the start of it.

The 745i can be made to do things no big car has done before. Body control is uncanny. Grip brushes the boundaries of the unreal. And since body roll is reduced by up to 80 per cent, the cabin remains a remarkably calm place, sports car g-forces notwithstanding. In short, the 745i equipped with Dynamic Drive appears to defy the physics of its considerable mass.

But not its size. You need wide open spaces to plumb all this potential. On typical British B-roads, the Seven's sheer width will cap pace long before the chassis cries 'enough'. The longer you spend with it, the more natural it seems to press that little bit harder and brake a few metres later. But the image I can't shake is of a jumbo jet that, magically, has acquired the handling elan of an F-16: kind of amazing but strangely futile, too.

It's odd because, if a 745i was mine, I'd weld every definable parameter to maximum Sport and throw away the fuse. The gains in response, grip and control far outweigh the only marginally compromised ride comfort. And, that being the case, I'd always feel uneasy about having paid for the alternative dynamic regimes. In truth, I'd want my 7-series smaller, lighter and prettier as well - quite a lot like the superseded model, in fact. Then again, if I really wanted a limo-sized car, I'd probably go for a Merc S-class and drive a little more slowly.

BMW's vision of the future is inspiring but dislocated by what's possible right now. The sheer amount of technology is a landmark in automotive evolution but the car itself is inevitably transitional. It places the burden on the driver to make the most of it, and the path is a little too tortuous for comfort.