The first bespoke M car since the BMW M1 is a 650hp hybrid SUV. Excited?
No, it's not an avant-garde Citroën from the 90s, it’s a big and brutish SUV. And a point that's being emphasised about the new Citroën - sorry, BMW XM - is it’s the most ‘proper’ M car since the M1. Why is this, you might wonder? It doesn’t look like your typical M car design, does it? Well, the X won’t come with any letters attached other than M. Unlike the M2, M3, M4, M5, M8 etc., which all have cheaper and weedier BMW variants, this XM is just an M car, that's it.
This is because it’s BMW’s Generation 5 hybrid tech, which includes a new, larger-capacity battery. Again, Ritter wouldn’t tell me the exact capacity and was sadly sharp enough to swerve my dastardliness when I slipped into the conversation “So how long does it take to charge from 0-100 per cent?” after he’d just told me the Generation 5 hardware can charge at up to 7.4kW. Oh well, I tried.
The body is all aluminium, and while this prototype XM was wrapped in the usual camouflage, it’s fairly clear that the underlying design follows the principles of that we've seen already. If you haven’t had that pleasure, then imagine a big SUV created from angles and flat, anti-radar surfaces. Or another way to think of it is Kryten’s head – as in Red Dwarf – on wheels.
My drive was with Ritter in the passenger seat – to answer my many questions but also to make sure I wasn’t fiddling with things I shouldn't be. We were also following a lead car through the, at times, breath-taking scenery surrounding Salzburg. Therefore, it was hardly a full-on road test but, even so, it was clear to me that the XM is very M. Take the ride, for a start.
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