The seven most techy features of the new BMW 7-Series

Once seen as a sign that a crunchy impact was imminent, flailing your hands around in the air is now encouraged. Do so in the vicinity of the 7-Series' centre console and a 3D sensor registers your movements and interprets them to adjust various controls. For example, unwanted phone calls can now be rejected with a nonchalant flick of the wrist.

Auto parking is not new, but this system works even without the driver inside. It seems Pierce Brosnan knew something we didn’t because, with eerie parallels to the 750iL controlled via the screen of his phone in Tomorrow Never Dies, the process is activated via the new BMW display key.

The human eye has reached its limitations – the 7-Series will handle things from here. At night, animals, humans, or any heat-radiating object for that matter (a smouldering meteor perhaps?) are shown on the central display screen and picked out by a marker beam from the headlights.

Honestly, who’s got time to steer, accelerate and brake these days? Luckily the 7-Series can do all three for you to varying degrees. The adaptive cruise will now read road signs and adjust your speed accordingly, while the traffic-jam assistant will take over completely in pesky stop-start tailbacks.

Using technology lifted from the i3 and i8, the 7’s structure is a medley of steel, aluminium and CFRP. The result is a lower centre of gravity and up to a 130kg saving compared to its predecessor. BMW’s name for this new structure is ‘carbon core’. Catchy.

Entering a destination into the satnav feeds its enormous brain. It passes the information to the eight-speed automatic gearbox allowing it to predictively shift when a hill or sharp corner approaches, while in the 740e plug-in hybrid it calculates a journey-specific strategy for consuming battery power in the most efficient manner.

A fiendishly complex front and rear self-levelling air suspension system lets you raise the ride height by 20mm (up to 22mph) on rough sections of road: hardly an off-roader, but handy nonetheless. Engaging sport mode drops it by 10mm at high speeds for slippier aero and tighter body control.