I do, however, detest the term ’shooting brake’. Every time I hear it I get the mental image of a car making a panic stop and the brake rotors just shooting out from the wheels under the strain.

It looks like Jesse James grafted a Mercedes R-Class onto a Dodge Magnum back end. Both cars flopped.

Nonetheless, I like it!

Does anyone remember those toys we had as a kid, the rotating box in three segments that let you mix and match the head, body and legs of different animals? Does anyone else think that this is more or less how BMW, VW and Daimler are designing products?

“Let’s see, we’ve tried wagon roofline and sedan door count with car ride height, no, wait, let’s try that with a coupe roof and a hatch! No, wait, let’s raise it to SUV height! Got it!” And thusly do we get things like the X6 and CF, though a kind of design mix-and-match.

I’ll just bet there’s a bunch of huge-ego engineers in upper management at each company that a) are too in love with their own brilliance and b) have yes-men underlings too scared to tell them when they’ve done something stupid.

And the headlights remind me of the Escort ZX2.