Remote parking ruled out for 2015 BMW 7 Series - for now

Legal issues concerning autonomous driving have forced BMW Australia to pull the handbrake on one of the headline technologies in its flagship 7 Series limousine ahead of its global release in October.

The Remote Control Parking function lets drivers exit the vehicle and use the key fob with a colour LED screen to direct the car to drive into or out of a tight parking slot or garage.

The logic is such a feature avoids the difficulty of the driver parking and then trying to open the doors with little room to manoeuvre.

BMW Australia spokeswoman Lenore Fletcher says there's every chance the feature will make an appearance on local cars in the near future.

"There are some steps we have to go through to comply with Australian laws and we're working on that now," she says.

The sixth-generation 7 Series still has plenty of other techno-wizardry. It has gesture recognition for audio volume controls and accepting or rejecting an incoming phone call, an inductive pad to recharge smartphones wirelessly, a touchscreen mounted on the top of the iDrive rotary controller and a bigger, brighter head-up display.

There's also a new adaptive mode in the so-called Driving Experience Control settings to adjust the vehicle's transmission and throttle responses, according to the driver's inputs and the nature of the route as determined by GPS mapping and forward facing cameras.

Weight has been trimmed by up to 130kg relative to the current car with carbon-fibre reinforced plastic first used on the BMW i3 and i8.