The BMW X6 is an impractical SUV with
coupe delusions, but sales success has bred another: the smaller X4. Talented,
tasteless, or both?
BMW launched the X4 in front of the
Guggenheim museum of modern art in Bilbao, which was appropriate as they are
both odd-shaped things brimming with baffling appeal.
A quick tour of the museum revealed a film
of flies landing on Yoko Ono’s pubes, which aren’t really up my artistic street
and possibly yours either, and the same can probably be said for coupe-ish
sports activity vehicles from BMW. But for all the head scratching about why on
earth somebody would find this sort of thing appealing, one married a Beatle
and the other is set to enter a market due to grow from 400k units currently,
to nearly 1.8m in the next decade.
The
X4 shares a lot with the X3, including its bonnet, front bumper, wings and
grille
So something must be going right, and there
are two precursors to the X4’s entry into the market that put it in context:
the huge success of the Range Rover Evoque, and the fact BMW has sold 250,000
X6s since it launched in 2008, despite regularly being the most lambasted
vehicle on sale today. Taste dictates, and people want cars like this, even if
on a rational level they seem to competently fulfill no brief other than to
make others roll their eyes in despair. Is it even worth going through the list
of ‘doesn’t have the space of/isn’t as good to drive as/ can’t hold a candle
to’ justifications for not choosing one? No? Moving on.
Twin
turbos? No, it’s a solitary twin-scroll turbo instead
The X4, as you would expect then, doesn’t
do anything especially different from the larger X6, offering a coupe-alike
roofline plonked atop an SUV’s body in a manner reminiscent of a fat bloke
wearing a baseball cap. What you can say about it though, is that it doesn’t
quite have the strident ‘f*** you’ jaw-jut aggression of the X6 thanks to its
smaller proportions. But it would have been refreshing to give it a bit more
individual character rather just making it look like the X6’s attack-dog little
brother.
The
X4's boot should prove capacious enough for most
The $5,130 M sport package on this
particular X4 includes a front bumper featuring gaping pods that make it look
as though its has swallowed a couple of exploding gobstoppers, and while it is
a more deft effort than the X6, you would be hard pushed to call it pretty, as
you would the Macan, or chunkily cute, as the Evoque.
Of the X3 on which it is based, it is only
slightly longer but nearly four centimetres lower, and occupants who have been
in an X3 may notice the X4’s slightly lower seating position, which is 20mm
further towards the floor in the front and 28mm in the back.
