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You would, more than ever, look for something dual-purpose. And that would be easy. There has never been a wider choice.
This hasn’t happened since the early 1900s when Rolls Royce produced cars of such quality and versatility that they were used not only as limousines but also as racing cars, armoured troop carriers and gunships, trailer pullers on farms, and were even fitted with train wheels to pull carriages along railway tracks.
Between then and now, versatile vehicles have been bog basic, street cars have struggled with pebbles and puddles, and designers have forced buyers to choose between posh and practical. The more prestigious a car became on First World superhighways, the more hopeless it became in any other context — like Africa.
Nowadays luxury has been re-united with logic in the clumsily-named but well-conceived and much-refined SUV class. Now style is also sensible, capable of handling our ad-mix of royal highways and dirt tracks without serious compromise on either.
To be mega executive you no longer need to be a lounge lizard, and to add a touch of macho you no longer need to drive a bone-crunching truckette. Now you can have a limousine, a sports car and a safari vehicle all in the same parking bay!
Sorry, but the Wabenzi syndrome doesn’t turn heads any more (except sometimes the other way), and a Ferrari on a Nairobi street would rotate eye sockets only in a what-a-plonker direction . . . upwards.
The stuff that’s moving the metal and stirring the blood is subtler than a station wagon, more speed-bump compatible than a sports car, swifter than a buggy, chic’er than a people carrier, tougher than a limo . . . yet can do the job of any and all of them.
Listed on this menu are names like Forester, Outback, Vitara, Tribeca, CRV, Rav, Freelander, Outlander, Tribute, X-Trail, C60, and other ever-so X’y limos. And if your budget demands higher spec and price than those, you don’t have to drive a luxury lorry — SUVs offer you the Porsche and VW Touareg.
Yes, modern SUVs are a bit techy for bush mechanics and they’re not off-roaders. But all of them offer fast and comfortable practicality, in the urban bundu or on the wider weekend.
Where does design go from here? My guess is practical things getting posher and vice versa as luxury and logic continue to miscegenate. Plus, of course, the much vaunted and long-awaited alternatives to the internal combustion engine. Design will chase the biggest markets — well east and south of the old world. – www.nation.co.ke.
Online Reporter