Owning a BMW 7-series is like a billboard proclaiming that the person driving it is not only classy and sophisticated, but they just don’t have time for your pedestrian concepts of turn signals. You can now join their oblivious elite class with , which is like a BMW 7-series, but better. And it’s cheap - real cheap.

started life as a BMW 7-series, and not the pre-facelift Bangle-butt model, but the infinitely more stylish and less controversial facelift version. Its lines still have a hint of that twitchy disjointedness in places, but the whole car flows pretty damn well from front to back, in my humble opinion. The V8 engine is now helped to a healthy 500 horsepower by way of a centrifugal supercharger that makes a nice audible whine when you’re blowing the doors off of plebes in their E-Classes. It’s got way more torque than a V10 BMW M5 and has night vision - like freaking Batman, for God’s sakes. All this opulence, technology, and grunt can be had for under $30 grand, which on the new market will get you into something that has features that might have been considered fancy in the Carter administration.

Obviously, when considering a luxury sedan as complex as this one, it pays to be thorough. Although it does look like the car has been taken care of quite well over its 70,000+ miles with no thick black marks on its vehicle history report , it would pay t take the car to an independent shop or a nearby dealer to have the car checked from front to back so you know what other costs this six-figure cruiser has in store for you in the future. The car does seem to have some high-dollar options, so if your plan is to resell this at a depreciated cost down the line, buying a fully loaded car can only help.

The BMW 7-series gets a tarnished reputation for being unreliable mechanically and electrically, but I’d blame the owners first and foremost. If you purchased a Boeing 747 and then skimped out on the required maintenance and checks, things would indeed fail prematurely, at which point some owners would simply cross their arms and curse the name of BMW to no end. But we know better. Owning an expensive luxury car can be a bit more intense than your regular daily driver, but that’s the whole point. .

is the founder of and writes and about on the internet. He owns the world’s cheapest , a , and he’s the only Jalopnik author that has never driven a Miata. He also has a real name that he didn’t feel was journalist-y enough so he used a pen name and this was the best he could do.

My name is Tavarish and I make videos about buying, modifying, and breaking cars. I also have…

You can also follow him on and . He won’t mind.