New Genre, New Model
Methinks BMW likes inventing new vehicle classifications. Maybe they really do think they are inventing something all-new. Perhaps it’s just the hubris of sales success that makes them feel like they’re the market leader among motorcycle manufacturers. Whatever the case – and whether it’s two wheels or four – the company just loves coming up with what they think are catchy new segment … umm … segmentations.
On the car side, BMW’s “ultimate driving machine” division believed that traditional sport utility vehicles didn’t quite capture all that is Bayerische Motoren Werke’s version of the SUV, the appellation simply too pedestrian, I suspect, and not, according to the company’s marketing mavens, capturing the true essence of the Munich company’s engineering. Thus did the X5, which began all this nonsense, become an SAV instead of an SUV, the former the acronym for Sports Activity Vehicle.
Now you might well wonder what difference the words “activity” and “utility” profess in what is, after all, just a two-box station wagon with a few extra centimetres of ground clearance.
I would have, for example, presumed that something that was utilitarian would include a number of activities, but maybe that’s just me. I suspect that what really got them off was the inventing of
