Man Maths: BMW M760Li xDrive

That’s cheating, though, and to make my game a bit more challenging, let’s enforce a strict but generous budget. Say, £35,000. What would you choose?

All the way down the M4 I wondered about a previous shape Range Rover, an L405. For £35,000 you could buy a four- or five-year-old car, a high-spec Autobiography if you don’t mind slightly higher mileage. A fine choice. The point here is that you want to step inside a car that makes you feel like you’re home even before the clock has started counting down on those three hours. It should be quiet, comfortable and effortless, and its cabin should be utterly serene as you cruise for mile after mile along the motorway.

But I’m not choosing the L405. I always find luxury saloons just a little bit more comfortable than luxury SUVs, probably because I prefer a slightly reclined seating position. Instead I’m picking the BMW 7 Series, the G11/G12 version, which was retired in 2022 to make way for the technically impressive but unfortunate-looking current model. And look, for £35,000 you can just about nick an M760Li xDrive, the long wheelbase model (which is what the G12 designation denotes) with a silken 600bhp V12.

These were £135,000 cars when new in 2017. A hundred grand gone in eight years! Ouch. Great news for us used car fantasists, though. Despite being probably the most sporting 7 Series BMW had ever produced – almost a contradiction in terms – the M760Li is one of the most soothing and luxurious cars I’ve driven. Refinement and noise suppression are excellent, ride comfort on air springs and active anti-roll bars and with that long wheelbase is supreme, and the 6.6-litre, twin-turbo motor, which produces a mighty 590lb ft of torque, is smooth as double cream pouring from a jug, and not much noisier.

My word, what a way to travel. This isn’t a full blown M-car but it carries little M badges (in BMW parlance it’s an M Performance variant), which means it should be more than just ludicrously comfortable – it ought to handle a bit too. And would you believe it? It really does. By the standards of such machines it steers well (rear-steer makes it feel smaller than it is), it doesn’t roll and lurch about like you might expect of a vast saloon and its rear-biased four-wheel drive system even allows it to slide like a true M-car. I spent a very enjoyable day on the Bruntingthorpe runway several years back demonstrating just that.

Not exactly what you need for late night schlep along the motorway, but it’s nice to know it can.

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