BMW’s V12 flagship didn’t just shock the establishment—it rewrote the rules

I. Speak Softly and Carry More Cylinders

BMW, a company known for well-made sports sedans, so thoroughly shocked the system with its new V12 and 750i/750iL (L for long wheelbase) that Mercedes delayed its new S-Class—taking an agonizing four years to respond. The undisputed elite, Rolls-Royce and Bentley, stuck to their tried-and-true formulas through 1998, arguably leading to their acquisition by BMW and Volkswagen Group, respectively, by the end of the 20th century. Jaguar found itself utterly outclassed. Aston Martin’s bizarre Lagonda sedan was a technological dead end (the 750iL walked all over it as well). And the Americans? Well, they hadn’t been true players in this game since the 1950s—Cadillac had long since abdicated the ultra-luxury throne to become a mere footnote, and Lincoln was busy churning out Town Cars for limo duty. Make no mistake—the 1988 BMW 750iL changed everything that makes a luxury flagship, and its influence on what modern luxury means cannot be overstated, 38 years and counting later.

BMW officially debuted the 750iL on March 5, 1987, at the Geneva Motor Show. Overnight, it was no longer enough for a luxury car to simply be a vault on wheels trimmed with book-matched walnut and Connolly leather. Henceforth, the world’s best luxury sedan also had to represent the pinnacle of engineering prowess and offer the most advanced technology available. Impeccable build quality and sumptuous materials became merely the starting point. BMW’s new V12 set a new benchmark: features like electronic drive-by-wire throttles, computer-controlled engine management with dual redundant ECUs, adaptive damping suspension, and even dual-pane insulated glass for a whisper-quiet cabin all became part of the flagship playbook. Suddenly, a proper luxury car was expected to be a showcase of technical wizardry as much as a status symbol.

Announcing the model, BMW CEO Eberhard von Kuenheim promised that this new flagship would “satisfy the highest standards which could be demanded of an automobile.” BMW built its last M760i “The Final V12” model thirty-five years later in June 2022, but its V12 legacy lives on—not only as the heart of every modern Rolls-Royce, but in its complete reconfiguration of the luxury landscape as the world knew it.

For the previous seven decades before the 750iL’s arrival, twelve-cylinder engines had been a decadent indulgence reserved almost exclusively for automotive royalty. The crème de la crème of the prewar era—marques like Rolls-Royce, Maybach, Pierce-Arrow, Packard, Horch, Cadillac, and Lincoln—produced grand limousines, elegant landaulets, and sporty cabriolets powered by a dozen cylinders. These bespoke machines, often bodied by famed coachbuilders to the buyer’s whim, were built for heads of state, royalty, movie stars, and aristocrats. Even celebrated figures like architect Frank Lloyd Wright indulged in V12 automobiles (Wright owned several, including a custom 1941 Lincoln Continental painted in his signature “Cherokee Red”).

In the United States, Lincoln quietly bowed out of the twelve-cylinder club in 1949 with the final Zephyr-based V12 Continental. In Germany, the last prewar Zwölfzylinder automobile was the 1939 Maybach Zeppelin DS8, an 8.0-liter V12 behemoth fit for an industrial magnate or a high-ranking official. For decades after World War II, the once-regal V12 became an endangered species in motoring, surviving only in the exotic realms of Italian sports cars and a few quirky outliers.

Enzo Ferrari founded his firm in 1947 and built his legendary reputation on twelve cylinders. Ferruccio Lamborghini, a tractor magnate (ask Jeremy Clarkson—they’re still in production) famously enraged by Enzo Ferrari’s arrogance, introduced his own V12 in 1964. Their engines demonstrated the perfect level of excess—the pinnacle of performance, an exhaust note to die for, and that signature V12 smoothness.

Jaguar belatedly joined the club in 1971, equipping its E-Type with a 5.3-liter V12. That engine was intended to be a prestigious upgrade from Jaguar’s storied inline-six, but in practice the heavier V12 blunted the E-Type’s edge—Enzo Ferrari himself, who once called the original six-cylinder E-Type “the most beautiful car in the world,” was no fan of the later V12 version.

Nevertheless, Jaguar found better use for that twelve in the XJ12 sedan of 1972. For about 15 years after its introduction, the Jaguar XJ12 was the only production four-door sedan in the world with a V12 under the hood, faithfully carrying the multi-cylinder torch through the malaise era. Mercedes-Benz, despite dominating the premium sedan market, offered no twelve-cylinder in a production car through the 1980s. (Stuttgart had toyed with the idea—rumors abound of a V12 prototype for the 1960s 600 Grosser—but nothing materialized for the showroom.) Rolls-Royce and Bentley clung stubbornly to their venerable 6.75-liter pushrod V8, a design dating to 1959. In fact, Rolls-Royce did not offer a V12 engine from 1940 all the way until 1998, and Bentley never did at all (it offered a version of the Volkswagen Group W12 from 2005-2024). By the mid-1980s, if you lusted after a twelve-cylinder road car with four seats, your options were an oddball cast of Italians and Brits: Ferrari’s aging 412 GT (a model whose roots went back to the 1972 365GTB 2+2), the wild wedge-shaped Lamborghini Countach (and equally outrageous Countach V12-powered LM002 off-road truck), or Jaguar’s XJ12 sedan and XJS grand tourer. In short, the V12 by 1986 was a rarefied emblem of either supercar performance or antiquated prestige—not a must-have for a modern luxury sedan.

Tapping into its own heritage as a 1910s aircraft engine manufacturer, BMW set out to restore some of Germany’s lost twelve-cylinder prestige. Plans for a V12 had actually begun inside BMW as early as 1972. Through the late 1970s and early 80s, engineers built experimental V12s (code-named M66) to explore the limits of refinement and innovation. The production result, the 5.0-liter M70 engine, was a technical tour de force. It employed a degree of redundancy straight out of the aviation world: dual Bosch Motronic digital engine computers, twin throttle bodies, two mass airflow sensors, two distributors—right down to two separate ignition circuits and coils for its twelve spark plugs. This ensured that the big engine ran with uncanny smoothness and reliability. BMW’s party trick drove its point home: with a coin standing on edge atop the intake manifold, the M70 idled in silence, daring the world to do better.

The German press and public heralded it as a national victory—after 41 years, a German automobile finally had twelve cylinders again, and in typically understated BMW fashion to boot. Even drivers of humbler Golfs and Opel sedans felt a vicarious pride that Germany now had a home-grown contender in the V12 arena. One British magazine simply declared the new 7 Series “the world’s finest large saloon.” Orders flooded in from plutocrats and diplomats alike, eager to get the finest machinery BMW had ever built. Car and Driver marveled in 1988 that “at any speed, [the 750iL] is more serene than anything we’ve driven short of a Rolls-Royce.” In fact, that was an understatement—for all its half-the-price brashness, the BMW actually posted a record-low interior noise level of just 67 dBA at 70 mph, making it quieter at cruise than a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur. 

Throughout the 1980s, Mercedes-Benz’s 560SEL had dominated the luxury sedan segment. As Car and Driver said in 1987, “the Mercedes-Benz 560SEL [is] the undisputed big kahuna of European luxury sedans… no other big-name brand wields as much unadulterated, greenback-encrusted clout.” Yet that mighty Mercedes relied on a V8, and by the late ’80s it and the car it powered were both showing their age.

At the time, a surprising number of well-heeled American buyers were actually choosing Mercedes’s clattering, smoky diesel variants over the gas models by a four-to-one ratio – a testament to how practicality and economy often trumped performance in that era of luxury. BMW’s new V12 was the complete opposite of a sooty, frugal diesel. It was an audacious play for high-performance serenity, an engine that offered both effortless power and uncanny smoothness. In one bold move, BMW recognized an opportunity to one-up Stuttgart by offering something nobody else did: high-performance serenity.

The 750iL and M70 together wasn’t just an escalation; it was a provocation on two fronts. It put both the German and the English old guard on notice—overnight, they had to reevaluate what defined a luxury sedan. Mercedes, utterly unprepared for this escalation, was forced into an arms race it hadn’t planned on. Munich’s sudden lunge for V12 supremacy sent Mercedes engineers scrambling back to their labs, and ultimately Stuttgart postponed the launch of its next S-Class (the W140) by almost two years to engineer a proper response. That response arrived in 1991 as the 600SEL, sporting a brand-new 6.0-liter V12 (the M120) with four camshafts, 48 valves, and nearly 400 horsepower—engineered explicitly to leapfrog BMW’s 300 hp, 24-valve V12.

Jaguar, for its part, was sent into a minor crisis by the 750iL’s debut. The Brits had proudly been the sole purveyor of twelve-cylinder sedans for years, but now their 1970s-vintage XJ12 looked positively antiquated. To make matters worse, Jaguar’s new XJ40 sedan (launched in 1986) had never been designed with a V12 in mind—an oversight that became painfully obvious once BMW’s twelve hit the market. As stopgap, Jaguar kept the old Series III XJ12 in limited production through 1992 while it hurriedly re-engineered the XJ40 platform to accept the big engine. The result was a short-lived XJ12 variant in 1993 that still wasn’t quite up to snuff. Just a year later, Jaguar had to introduce an updated XJ (the X300 generation) with yet another iteration of the V12. In the span of five years (1992–1996), Jaguar’s flagship went through three different twelve-cylinder saloon models in an attempt to save face. It was a messy, expensive scramble – clear evidence that Coventry had been caught on the wrong foot by BMW’s bold move.

Sensing that it had tapped into a winning formula, Munich doubled down in 1989 by launching the 850i, a V12 grand touring coupe. In doing so, BMW created the hottest one-two punch in the luxury car world: by the end of the ’80s, the fastest and most desirable sedan and coupe in Europe both wore the blue-and-white roundel and packed twelve cylinders. Mercedes had no answer to the 8 Series coupe until it rolled out the V12-powered 600SEC in 1993, two years later. Ferrari’s four-seat V12 grand tourer, the antiquated 412, didn’t stand a chance—despite its prancing horse pedigree, Maranello’s 1970s-era GT was utterly outclassed by the high-tech 850i in speed, comfort, and civility. In one fell swoop, the BMW 750iL and 850i rendered a whole roster of yesterday’s über-benchmarks effectively obsolete. Rolls-Royce’s Silver Spirit and Spur, Bentley’s Turbo R and Mulsanne, Jaguar’s XJ12 and XJS, Aston Martin’s Virage coupe and its oddball Lagonda sedan—all of them suddenly felt one step behind the new order. BMW had proven that a Teutonic machine with space-age electronics and a howling V12 could offer a more compelling blend of performance and luxury than any of the old-guard titans born of  traditioṇ.

That successor car of the late ’90s was so revered it found favor in the highest circles: E38 750iLs ferried presidents and popes, and even became a Hollywood icon as James Bond’s gadget-filled ride in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). In that film, 007 famously controls his 750iL remotely from the back seat using a modified phone – an almost prophetic nod to BMW’s real-life Display Key feature two decades later, which let owners maneuver a 7 Series at low speed from outside the vehicle.

From there emerged the Motorsport-tuned S70B56, powering the 850CSi grand tourer and laying the foundation for the legendary S70/2—the 627-horsepower V12 Gordon Murray selected for the McLaren F1. That engine triumphed outright at Le Mans in 1995, forever cementing BMW’s V12 reputation as not merely smooth, but savage.

In the 2000s, each successive BMW V12 introduced new innovations. The N73 V12 arrived in 2003 with direct fuel injection, and the twin-turbo N74 followed, eventually surpassing 600 horsepower in the 2010s M760Li xDrive sedan. Fittingly, those engines found dual duty: they not only powered BMW’s own 7 Series flagships, but also every model in the resurrected Rolls-Royce lineup after BMW acquired the storied British marque. From the Phantom to the Ghost and Wraith, a BMW-derived V12 has been the beating heart of every Rolls-Royce since 2003. Finally, in 2022, the era came to a close—BMW quietly bowed out of twelve-cylinder production with a dozen specially-built M760i “Final V12” edition sedans, each a 601-hp swan song adorned with unique touches from BMW Individual. These twelve cars, delivered exclusively to the U.S. market’s most loyal V12 customers, marked the end of BMW’s 35-year chapter as a V12 automaker.

BMW’s V12 endures now only in Rolls-Royce, once again demonstrating the engine’s continuing ability to punch far above its weight. While a V12 is now the only option for petrol lovers looking for a Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood, Rolls didn’t introduce a V12 until 1998—and only could then because BMW provided the engine from its E38 750iL. Bentley never produced a V12 at all; its first twelve-cylinder models in the early 2000s featured a W12, an altogether different animal—one shared with its corporate cousins, the upwardly mobile people’s car Volkswagen Phaeton and the understated-to-a-fault Audi A8.

With the 1987 750iL, BMW didn’t merely join the party—it changed the dress code, rewrote the guest list, and locked the doors behind it. In a silent coup, BMW won a game no one knew it was playing—or even wanted to play. It had built the best, measured not just in comfort, build quality, or prestige, but through engineering supremacy and cutting-edge technology. And everybody else had no time to catch up.