BMW Launches The XM - As Heavy As A Munich Suburb

There was much frothing last week as BMW unveiled its first all-new, standalone M-car since the 1978 M1. For those of you who don’t yet know, it’s a vast hybrid/electric SUV thing that weighs as much as a Munich suburb and has been styled to make children weep. It could be called an anti-BMW, perhaps even an anti-M-car, because it doesn’t so much take what we assumed were the key ingredients of BMW’s go-faster department and contort them, as gobble them up, digest them and curl them out into a perfect crown of ex-BMW-turd. The strange thing being, I wholeheartedly agree with BMW taking this decision. It all makes sense.

The 2710kg XM is the launch kitten - well, bloated tabby - for the next generation of fast BMWs. It’s a 662hp hybrid based around the 4.4-litre V8, with 482hp of fossil grunt and 162hp of electricity that will hit over 170mph. It has some electric-only range of 50-ish miles. There will be one with well over 700hp by the end of next year. Alongside not being sure I want to imagine how long it takes to stop 2.7 tonnes from 170mph, I’m also not willing to instantly rubbish the dynamics of a car like this again before driving it. 

I was always taught weight was the greatest enemy of chassis behaviour, and that turned out to be poor information. Most car makers can now cajole staggering grip, agility and comfort from these lumps because the foreheads of the clever people who make the tyres and dampers have grown so large they can defeat science itself. Weight is actually the enemy of feeling connected to a car - experiencing all those cuddly old emotions like steering feel and throttle cables and the stuff I used to write about in Autocar magazine back in the day. I still crave them, but BMW M hasn’t made a car that offers such morsels since about 1994. So the fact the XM (a badge which is still a Citroen in my head) weighs so much isn’t necessarily a problem. Bear with me here, I’m not drunk.

Nor is the fact it’s a massive, deliberately brutalistic looking tank. If you’re about to make a large sales splash about your future, surely you choose the fastest-growing sector to do it in? Believe me, I so wish that the hybrid era of M had been showcased through a 800kg all-carbon, flat-twin powered, mid-engined sports car. But they’d have sold about seven and a year into production literally no one would have any idea that BMW M was going hybrid. You know you’re getting old when you have to observe young people’s behaviour to understand the world. Rohan, without whom Collecting Cars wouldn’t function, loves the Rolls-Royce Cullinan. I despise the thing, but it is to him that BMW need to pitch themselves, not some old spitter like me. 

And as a packaging exercise, this is a lovely big space to play with. The floorpan of this monster must be (resists temptation to refer to Wales) the size of half a football pitch, which means the engineers could save some knuckle flesh and see what they were doing. The Mercedes-AMG C63 engineering team must hate them. So in marketing and engineering terms, the XM makes perfect sense. And we know it will sell like chilled lemonade in Dubai.

But for all this open-minded maturity in the face of possibly my favourite car brand re-booting itself through the lens of a sodding truck, I have one tiny piece of residual frustration - THIS IS ALL OUR FAULT. If stupid people didn’t buy these god-awful SUV things, then they wouldn’t be so popular and marketing departments wouldn’t be obsessed with them. And the world wouldn’t feel so upside down. Tracing the roots of this SUV madness isn’t difficult - the moment Land Rover bolted some comfortable seats onto a Defender and pinched the word ‘Range’ people, quite logically, said ‘Oooh, this is rather nice’. And henceforth we were all totally bollocksed. The public should never have been allowed access to something so appealing. 

What I find so difficult to fathom is the way car-makers try to balance this SUV nonsense with their other great fib - efficiency. They all want us to think they’re doing their utmost to use fewer resources, but the way they do this is make cars that are physically bigger and heavier than anyone needs them to be. Some cigarette packet mathematics suggests that most SUVs are probably 30 percent heavier than their saloon/sedan equivalents. Which means most car companies emit, say, 20 percent more emissions and use many more materials so the marketing departments can keep people interested in, er, trucks. It’s all madness.

And the XM? It was a fascinating Citroën, and so long as some of the tech trickles down into cars I want to drive and purchase sometimes soon, then I can get over this whole sorry episode. Moving on.