Photo: x-tomi
An Aston Martin minivan - the shock, the horror! Why would anybody want to come up with such a thing, even as a rendering, like the one you see above? Well, as strange as it might sound, about two decades ago, we could’ve been close to creating a parallel universe in which a people mover built by the British GT craftsmen would have actually happened.
Think about it - the late 90s were the Big Bang of the SUV universe. It was back then when the 4x4 workhorses became city machines, with the Toyota RAV4 and the Mercedes-Benz ML being among the first to popularise the genre.
Imagine that we could have lived in a world where MPVs, not SUVs, would have gained momentum. In case you find it hard to visualise such a thing, let’s talk about Porsche a little bit.
Sure, Mercedes and BMW built the first premium SUVs, but it was Zuffenhausen that truly bent the rules when they came up with the Cayenne in the late 2000s. Want to know what Porsche did (outside its sportscar range) before it developed the Cayenne? Yep, a people mover.
It was Porsche who helped Opel develop the first Zafira in the mid-90s. It was a pretty smart minivan and at the same time something that caught on, since it also ended up being sold as a... Subaru.
Had the planets lined up in a people-moving order, our contemporary landscape would’ve looked pretty different nowadays.
For one thing, we now live in a time when Bentley is close to the market launch of an SUV, while Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce are seriously considering jumping the bandwagon. Heck, the first two have even showed us SUV concepts.
And the imminent Bentayga isn’t Bentley’s first SUV. That title goes to the Bentley Dominator, of which the company built six units back in 1995 for the Sultan of Bruney (of course).
Well, imagine all these cars, from the Cayenne and Bentayga to the concepts I mentioned above, were MPVs. Affluent families would’ve loaded their children in these ridiculously expensive machines every morning and off to school they would’ve gone.
Stating that may make me seem like I’m on the wrong pills today, but "crazy" is how visitors from Minivan Planet would label our SUV-populated world.
Don't get me wrong, I utterly despise the prospect, but we only avoided it by the same kind of margin that kept the Earth from being destroyed by a giant meteorite. And that, dear gearheads, is damn right terrifying.
Many car aficionados have easily gotten over the fact that GT or sportscar producers have or may include SUVs in the mix, since this helps them stay on the market and build those mouth-watering coupes. Once again, the same could’ve happened to MPVs. (By the way, I must thank pixel painter X-Tomi for the pic above).
And just like Porsche’s engineers can make a Cayenne incredibly fast, we would’ve ended up with seven-seaters that lapped the Nurburgring quicker than certain sportscars - you, in your Lotus, overtaken by some bloke in a minivan.
The only company that would remain unchanged no matter the universe is McLaren, which doesn’t do SUVs, simply because their young age doesn’t allow them to confuse customers with such products.
Wait, what if the car above is actually an Aston Martin and not the 2015 Galaxy that Ford just launched in Cologne, Germany? After all, it does have an Aston Martin front grille...
Imagine that we could have lived in a world where MPVs, not SUVs, would have gained momentum. In case you find it hard to visualise such a thing, let’s talk about Porsche a little bit.
Sure, Mercedes and BMW built the first premium SUVs, but it was Zuffenhausen that truly bent the rules when they came up with the Cayenne in the late 2000s. Want to know what Porsche did (outside its sportscar range) before it developed the Cayenne? Yep, a people mover.
It was Porsche who helped Opel develop the first Zafira in the mid-90s. It was a pretty smart minivan and at the same time something that caught on, since it also ended up being sold as a... Subaru.
Had the planets lined up in a people-moving order, our contemporary landscape would’ve looked pretty different nowadays.
For one thing, we now live in a time when Bentley is close to the market launch of an SUV, while Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce are seriously considering jumping the bandwagon. Heck, the first two have even showed us SUV concepts.
And the imminent Bentayga isn’t Bentley’s first SUV. That title goes to the Bentley Dominator, of which the company built six units back in 1995 for the Sultan of Bruney (of course).
Well, imagine all these cars, from the Cayenne and Bentayga to the concepts I mentioned above, were MPVs. Affluent families would’ve loaded their children in these ridiculously expensive machines every morning and off to school they would’ve gone.
Stating that may make me seem like I’m on the wrong pills today, but "crazy" is how visitors from Minivan Planet would label our SUV-populated world.
Don't get me wrong, I utterly despise the prospect, but we only avoided it by the same kind of margin that kept the Earth from being destroyed by a giant meteorite. And that, dear gearheads, is damn right terrifying.
Many car aficionados have easily gotten over the fact that GT or sportscar producers have or may include SUVs in the mix, since this helps them stay on the market and build those mouth-watering coupes. Once again, the same could’ve happened to MPVs. (By the way, I must thank pixel painter X-Tomi for the pic above).
And just like Porsche’s engineers can make a Cayenne incredibly fast, we would’ve ended up with seven-seaters that lapped the Nurburgring quicker than certain sportscars - you, in your Lotus, overtaken by some bloke in a minivan.
The only company that would remain unchanged no matter the universe is McLaren, which doesn’t do SUVs, simply because their young age doesn’t allow them to confuse customers with such products.
Wait, what if the car above is actually an Aston Martin and not the 2015 Galaxy that Ford just launched in Cologne, Germany? After all, it does have an Aston Martin front grille...
Google News