Last Sunday, I learnt how to whistle with two fingers in my mouth. Now don’t even try it – it is a dirty learning curve that involves making gory sounds, spraying saliva a good distance and earning confused looks from important people in your life, like your children, and an ‘I knew something was wrong all these years’ gesture from your spouse. But if do you succeed in emitting a slight squeak after repeated efforts, then you feel that you are on top of the world. I should know, as I have been trying without success for close to three decades.
Some seven years back, BMW decided to learn something new too. They made their first attempt at engineering an SUV after promoting the cause of brilliant rear-wheel driven sedans that built an ardent base of followers who didn’t mind paying through their nose for a degree of driving involvement. As some of you might realise, making an SUV is the antithesis of making a road-hugging sports sedan. It is heavier, taller and generally better appointed than most posh houses in South Mumbai. Expecting them to go around corners the way only BMWs are supposed to is like asking P Chidambaram to come up with fresh taxation proposals in an election year. But they managed and the first generation X5 was more than just a 5 Series on stilts. Sure it was a classic case of over-engineering, but the behemoth was a brilliant tarmac bruiser with more than modest all-road worthiness. But the investment banker types who bought the X5 made it an urban icon without ever stepping into the slush, though its all-wheel drive system ensured that its owners reached ski resorts in the middle of winter without hassle. A point that BMW factored in when they made the second generation X5 – heck, they even gave it a double wishbone front suspension system, which is the hallmark of any good sports car.
Mercedes-Benz has been building one of the most capable 4WD vehicles on earth for time immemorial in the form of the G-Wagen. And when they chose to chase cash-rich American SUV buyers, they stayed true to what they knew best – a body-on-chassis vehicle that looked modern. However, with the world changing around them, Stuttgart too was forced to introduce a monocoque SUV that was meant more for the road than the rough – so that soccer moms could trudge through traffic effortlessly on the way to another mall. Of course it was a major improvement over the previous car, but since then, BMW has upped the ante and yet another sportscar maker, Porsche, was already happy chewing the SUV bullet. The end result was a second generation M-Class that was more of an apex hunter than the previous version.We have both the new X5 as well as the new M-Class on sale in India, with the former being a tad newer. For this test, we brought together the diesels – the X5 3.0d and the ML 320 CDI.
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