The BMW X5. One million built since 1999
Eleven years after it launched the X5, BMW is celebrating 1,000,000 X5s built.
When we think of luxury SUVs we always think it started with the Range Rover. Which of course it did. But it’s easy to forget that what we think of as a recent phenomenon – the performance luxury SUV – was spawned by BMW eleven years ago with the first BMW X5.
And in that 11 years, BMW has managed to churn out 1,000,000 X5s. Which is a quite remarkable achievement. The X5 has changed in those eleven years (as shown in the photo at the top) but apart from growing in size – as every car seems to have done in the last decade – it still offers the same combination of a high-riding position, great on-road manners and high quality cabin. Such has been the impact in the last eleven years that CAP called the BMW X5 the ‘Luxury Used Car of the Decade‘.
In the BMW stable the X5 has created a BMW ‘X’ brand which now includes the X6, X3 and X1 and it seems quite likely that we will see a BMW X4 before too long. But it’s not just at BMW that the X5 spawned a new genre of cars, it’s with other luxury car makers too. Land Rover had to respond with the Range Rover Sport, Mercedes brought the ML to the party and Porsche did the once unthinkable and launched the Cayenne (which may well have saved Porsche – all because of the X5).
The last decade has seen the car landscape transformed, but the X5 keeps on selling. In a clear sign of how much things have changed, the millionth X5 has been built in BMW’s Spartanburg Plant in South Carolina, USA. It’s a sapphire black metallic BMW X5 xDrive35i with cinnamon brown Nevada leather trim and is heading off to a customer in China.
Who’d have thought the BMW X5 could have such an impact?
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