X Marks The Spot

The new BMW X4 SUV is a surprise package – in a good way.

- Kushan Mitra

The guy who sleeps on a bed of hundred dollar notes must be the guy who came up with the moniker ‘Sports Utility Vehicle’ - the big, bruising, road machines that we all love to buy. These are vehicles that are neither really sporting nor utilitarian, but ‘Sports Utility Vehicle’ makes them sound cool and practical, and even though you end up buying something the size of a US Navy Supercarrier, you feel good about yourself. An SUV is, in my humble opinion, a gigantic phallic symbol in the world of cars.

However, when you have cars that have been around long enough, engineers can start to do some really cool things. Look at compact sedans in India – earlier, they looked like a designer took a meat cleaver to the rear end, and now, the least that can be said is they don’t all look positively ugly. The same goes for SUVs, if you go back in time and see some of the earlier ones - vehicles like the first-generation BMW X5, for example, which have not really aged that well. Back in the day, they didn’t exactly drive very well either.