It took 15 seconds. I’m not even near joking. It took 15 seconds.
Before I get to that though I’d like to talk about the image/perception that exists in most retail stores and brand “equity” that bounds around our modern age. It is devil’s-hand crafted to make you feel inspired and worthy, apparently.
By Gavin ‘I hate BMWs until the moment the door closes’ Williams
As a trivial example, walk into any Edgars store or gaze at one of their catalogues and you see a reassuring bunch of youth slouched on a beach or leaping airwards indiscriminately near a table at a picnic sight. They’re as happy as people acting happy in outdoor scenarios. Walk into the same retail store and again, you’re presented with aisles, posters and “shelf talkers” (believe me, this phrase exists) depicting idyllic tableaus of utter winsomeness and aw-shucks-ain’t life-just the bees-knees-ness.
But here’s my point. People have to work there. In Edgars. Rubbish hours over holiday seasons when they’d rather be in the scenarios depicted on the posters surrounding them. Instead, behind the false façade of commerce these stores – just behind the change rooms in the bowels of the mall – there are grudging employee smoking areas and bitter “assistant managers” spouting nonsense to hung-over and disinterested staff. I have a friend, who in high school walked directly to his senior supervisor and handed over his name tag on some lost Saturday afternoon at Edgars after a customer asked him in all earnestness “Do you have that jean whiff the star and tick on it?”
BMW has no such problem. Although I’m loathed to admit it, they deliver on what they preach. Anything not containing a 3 or a 1 as the prefix that is. It was no coincidence then, that when I picked up the new oddball X6 from their corporate image head quarters at the V&A Waterfront, behind the perfectly poised arc-lighting, polished marble and designer luggage I found a golden, sculpted, squat banshee waiting silently for me. It was far away from the bowels of the mall, the opposite of the tired projectionist beaming imagery of far off, exotic times and pleasures as he slowly fades to nicotine gray.
It was what you see on the poster only better. It was the depicted “lifestyle” made shimmering metal (not even Bee-Em’s CEO could tell you what that lifestyle is) but it was there. Someone once said (and I’m paraphrasing here so I might have dreamt it) “Californians invented the phrase ‘lifestyle’ – and for that reason alone they all deserve to die”. Yes. BMW invented this peculiar vehicle of choice for divorced plastic surgeons that still have to pick up their own kids and other people’s women.
Actually, when I first saw the snaps of the X6 I thought “God. That’s absolutely hideous”, followed by a “what’s the point of that?” moment; as a lifelong BMW anti-acolyte it was pretty easy to dismiss. So in some ways it did differ from its poster imagery: for once, the reality actually looked better than the hype. The opposite of California/Edgars then, towards which its “carrying-TVs” flanks and macho snout is no doubt aimed.
Then it happened. 15 seconds after I turned the key I turned into a dipshit. A popped collar fuckwit. A knob. A Man. A boytjie. A… someone who equates your intelligence to how much money you’re making. I became what I was not. I became a BMW X6 driver. I pulled up to the stop street not 20 metres from where I’d picked up the car and a particularly gorgeous woman walked across the street with her 6-or-7 year-old child in tow. Possessed by the BMW demon I wound down the window and in tongues that sounded strangely like my own voice I said “Your mom’s quite hot, hey”. I was mortified at my own shiteness, but had an inward sense of righteousness at the same time. It was weirdly fulfilling. It was the world of BMW. Unfettered and awful.
I could go into the brilliant detail of how this car drives and feels. So I will. It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant to drive, but the sculpted bottom line is that it turned me into a dick, and I cannot forgive it that. It has a complicated rear diff system, which, as Ciro explained to me works not unlike a tank, when one side of it’s pulling you in one direction the other side isn’t. It’s complicated and makes you wonder who actually won the war when the US car industry is teetering on the brink of oblivion and England’s already there.
The twin-turbo’d 3.0 litre specimen we drove is just fantastic, with plenty of torque, curvy power and the ability to hound down the coast at a right-old canter. I feel sorry for BMW in many respects, they make such perfect cars. Audis are too hard, Mercs are too old money and the rest don’t even have an invitation to the banquet. But you buy into the poster; you buy into the lifestyle it seems to project. And the Bee-Em at least lives up to it. For better or worse. All cars are almost the same these days; it’s mostly perceived imagery and very slight dynamic differences that make them one different from the next.
And if someone like me can be this corrupted by the necromantic call of the BMW x6, imagine what it’ll do to a genuine asshole.
Unlike just about every other brand out there, at least it delivers on its promise. Tell me; when last did you want to break into a game of sunlit park volleyball just because you’re wearing a Truworths Pullover?
And now there’s an M version. God help us. Your Mom’s quite hot though.
