You feel now as we felt then.

September 29th, 2022

Amidst all the hubbub over XM you’d think no one had paid a lick of attention to the crash course and unabashed curse BMW has binged on for two decades.

It’s an affront to BMW! To my eyes! To good taste and sense and aesthetics! To UDM! To design itself.

Twenty years ago E65 was the same punch in the chest. The same disillusionment, and dismay. To that this adds SUV, which we’ve had 5 more years to accept they’re capable of doing well, and the defecation upon M, which they’ve done repeatedly since before Y2K.

Then they had Range Rover to take the high road to China. Now the X7 isn’t skyscraper enough. The iX too restrained. And the X5 and X6 and X3 and X4 Ms too constrained and contained.

So we get this second coming of sheet metal bent around components it seemingly reluctantly and then resignedly fails to contain. Another mule let out early, another sketch retrieved from the waste bin.

Both look like what MJ might create. Both refuse to be ignored, a la Fatal Attraction.

And that’s the beauty of it, even if beautiful is not what one can call it.

Where I couldn’t bring myself to look at the 7er then, and still cannot, this time I haven’t been able to look away. When I saw it in person some weeks ago, spent far longer walking around it in eccentric circles, my eyes and brain picking up on different strains and refrains the way you do at an art gallery. Something modern, pretentious, inscrutable, but somehow undeniably labored over. Even if you wish like hell it had been aborted.

Yet as E65 signaled what’s to come, so does this. If you can’t see why they did it, you haven’t been paying attention, nor are you the buyer paying for such an invention.

Like the X5 and the Cayenne, the DBX and the Macan, the Urus and the Purosangue, it will print money the way Elon fans somehow still believe their latent and perennially late Robotaxis will. And if we’re lucky those who line up to buy it will fund projects that are more our speed and cup of green tea.

Between this and E65, I’ll take this. 20 years on that tangled bungle still looks unfinished, whereas 20 from now I suspect this’ll appear they completed their homework early.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.