BMW X6 50i

There is a sense with BMW’s spectacularly silly X6 that here is a vehicle designed to showcase that we are all wrong concerning the one thing Germans are perceived to not do particularly well: irony. Humour and hipsterism, two unconditional pillars of applied irony, are as foreign to German existence as tardiness or square shapes with untidy corners.

Somewhere in the ascent of German automotive brands to their current position of absolute global dominance, the irrational contempt of unchallenged success created a margin for the Germans to be ironic. A way of showcasing their inherent ability to do everything so much better than anyone else,  the assurance that even a bad idea, executed in the Fatherland, could be successfully exported worldwide. There is, truthfully, no other explanation for the X6.

We guarantee that no customers walked out of dealerships a decade ago while shopping for an X5 and were desperately disappointed that BMW did not offer a four seat only, two tonne, all wheel drive vehicle with limited head and cargo room.

Unapologetically styled to look as large and wide as possible, the X6’s beginning was also the end of design icon/enfant terrible Chris Bangle’s tenure at BMW and its legacy, status even, is troubling. No other vehicle provides the anti-car lobby with more evidence of manufacturers providing over engineered answers to questions people in the real world simply never asked. If you want a sophisticated German SUV with pavement conquering ground clearance and an iconic red and blue roundel centred in its helm, the X5 has never left anyone bitter or disappointed.

The mere presence of the X6 could be construed as BMW mocking its customers. Daring them to buy a car nearly as hard to justify as it is to explain Monkey Gland sauce to a five-year-old. The new one, troublingly, is even bigger. It is 23mm more substantial bumper to bumper, with a roofline arching 60mm lower, but with 50mm more headroom. There’s 75 more litres of boot space, while a new valance and more pinched rear hatch-door sculpting make the new X6 look lower and, almost unbelievably, wider.

Technically it remains a marvel when you tabulate the numbers. Here is a 2170 kg car, with 212 mm of underbody clearance capable of 0-100 kph in 4.8 seconds for a debit of only 9.7l/100km if you display some principled boost restraint. Those aforementioned numbers, as terrifically swift and frugal as they read, are wholly inadequate at showing quite how contemptuous the X6 is of most principles of physics when its supercar like 315 cross section tyres start rolling.

Across the road from BMW’s Spartanburg assembly plant in South Carolina, is a rather narrow and undulating test track. It’s the baiting kind of asphalt, poured over uneven ground, that’s fenced in a touch too closely with Armco to ever allow one real ease when lapping at pace.

Here, at the home of BMW’s North American performance driving school, the brand’s engineers hosted us, keen to justify what is inarguably the silliest car they’ve ever worked on. Rows of new M3s, M4s and even a few 1Ms are parked in and around the pits. All choice cars for exploring the treacherously narrow 2.5km circuit. The X6 looks as out of place here as a hippo at the start of a great migration of gazelles across Tanzania’s Serengeti plains.

Settled in behind the helm, awaiting two way radio confirmation that we are to chase a pace car around, the only anticipation is of understeer: front-outer tyre ruining, runoff area-mowing, terminal, hateful understeer. Seeing as the X6 remains BMW’s most ironic car ever, this doesn't happen. At all. Instead the lapping speeds increase with X6’s capable torque vectoring embracing your ambitions by pivoting the Bavarian hippo into and through corners at angles you last achieved with your toy cars as a child, manipulating them between thumb and forefinger around the living room carpet circuit.

A vehicle weighing 2500kg (fuelled and with all passenger seats occupied), standing 1.7 metres tall, is not supposed to do what all great BMWs are inherently capable of: shrinking around the driver’s ambitions. Optioned with M suspension bits, which include self-levelling air-suspension at the rear, the X6 showed a distain for physics not dissimilar to the Mannshscaff’s indifference to the hopes and dreams of 200 million Brazilians in July this year. The X6’s ability to manage cornering momentum is so startlingly accomplished you never feel any of the 4.4-litre V8’s 650 torques being waywardly ill-deployed, unlike other overpowered vehicles with a 500mm wading depth.

Haters will point to the X6 being nothing more than an illogical X5, built purely as a profit platform for BMW. It also happens to be the world’s most expensive and only high-performance hatchback that tows 3.5 tonnes too. The irony of that, commensurate with the X6’s driving ability, is crushing