STYLE > SUBSTANCE

The BMW X6’s third generation is here. Yes, it still divides opinion

- Anubhav Sharma

I am not sure whether it is my age or this pandemic that has blurred weeks, months, and even years. It doesn’t feel like 12 years ago when the BMW X6 first came out and certainly the debates on how it looked don’t feel like they happened that long ago. Whether you loved it or hated it, you were certainly talking about it. BMW has sold over 440,000 of them till now and almost every other competitor has a similar coupé-shaped SUV. Yeah, it is a little mind-bending to believe, but BMW carved a niche out for everyone with the X6. Considering that the new X6 shares a lot with its sibling, the new X5, I guess it is the design that works in the former’s favour. Yeah, even I read the last sentence twice after I wrote it.

Most of my conversations around the first-generation X6 have been about two things – how unsightly it looked and the lovely V8 it had. Looking at the X6 then, one felt like there were two teams of designers, one working on a coupé and the other on an SUV. Midway, they got bored and the X6 was born. But the engineers did not get bored and you got a car (or an SUV, your call) which performed like a BMW should. With the latest X6, the designers were not bored at all; if anything, they tried to make up for the last two times.