Blunder Buses: BMW 5 Series Gran Turismo

White space. Just a glinting sliver of it. There might lie gold. A couple of decades ago, in the car makers’ ceaseless quest to find a few more thousand sales, designers and product planners worked hard to find new and undiscovered variants of the motor car more than a century after the first of the species had appeared.

Surprisingly, despite carpet bombing the market with hatchbacks, saloons, MPVs, two-seat city cars, coupés, cabriolets, sports cars, estates, supercars, sports estates, crossovers, SUVs and the occasional limited edition hypercar, unearthings occurred. The Range Rover Evoque was one. The Mercedes R-Class another. The Golf Plus a third. And at least as controversial as the most controversial of these three – the car-cum-minibus that was the R-Class – was BMW’s X6, a hulking great fastback SUV with a cliff of a rear end.

Many, your mildly appalled reporter among them, reckoned the X6 would fail. Too big, too brash and, with less utility than the X5 upon which it was based, too impractical. How wrong we were. It’s a model that’s very much here today, now in its third generation and a very healthy white space success having scored around half a million sales to date.