New car news

14 May 2009 - 10:00

“I’m in quite a lot of pain…”

It may be alarmingly, bemusingly good to drive, but we've still never quite figured out the point of the BMW X6.

But now all becomes clear. BMW has shown off an X6 ambulance at the Rescue Vehicle Show in Fulda, Germany. Doesn't the big coupe-SUV-thingy look at home with emergency vehicle livery and big flashing lights?

You may have spotted a flaw. The one about where the hell they're going to fit all the stretchered, lightly broken people. But, says BMW, that's not what the X6 ambulance is about.

Instead, it's a first-responder vehicle, designed to get to the scene of an accident before larger ambulances and, presumably, to confuse the hell out of the injured once it arrives. ("Sod the anaesthetic, what in the name of Jehovah is that car you've turned up in?")

Speed shouldn't be a problem - the X6 ambulance is armed with a 303kW twin-turbo V8 capable of punting it to 100km/h in just over five seconds.

Quite how it's going to squeeze through city traffic - no tape measures exist that are long enough to measure the width of the X6, but best estimates put it somewhere around a quarter-mile across - remains unclear, but Top Gear selflessly volunteers for a full pace blues-and-twos sprint through the mean streets of, er, Bavaria.

This has got us thinking: what emergency response vehicles would you like to see on your local roads? We're thinking Ariel Atom ambulance...