Monthly Motor - September 2014
All Your Motoring Needs from Kenyan Publishers Media 7 Group
All Your Motoring Needs from Kenyan Publishers Media 7 Group
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Santiusae LAUNCH demrae<br />
BMW 4 Series Gran Coupé<br />
- Handsomely Retro<br />
By Evan Reddy<br />
In the 1970s and ’80s, several European carmakers offered premium<br />
hatchback saloons. However, the traditionally conservative German<br />
brands were not among them. That situation began to change in recent<br />
years with the advent of Audi’s A5 Sportback and A7.<br />
Now BMW is joining the premiumhatchback<br />
party with the 4-series<br />
Gran Coupé. A car that the brand’s<br />
head of exterior design, Karim<br />
Habib, calls “perhaps the most<br />
beautiful variation of this architecture.” By architecture,<br />
he means the F3x platform, which underpins<br />
no fewer than seven body styles: 3 Series saloon &<br />
sport wagon, long-wheelbase China-only saloon &<br />
Gran Turismo, the 4 Series Coupé & convertible and<br />
now the 4 Series Gran Coupé.<br />
It has been a decade since Mercedes-Benz<br />
launched its first-generation CLS. By now, there<br />
should be nothing strange about a car with back<br />
doors being called a Coupé. While BMW now rivals<br />
the CLS with its own 6 Series Gran Coupé, that portfolio<br />
has been extended a notch down the pecking<br />
order with the new 4 Series Gran Coupé. Yet unlike<br />
its bigger brother, the ‘fastback’ 4 Series Gran Coupé<br />
has five doors and you can think of it as a somewhat<br />
direct rival to Audi’s aforementioned A5 Sportback.<br />
This is a ‘4+1’ seater with a generous 480-litre boot<br />
volume and its main aim in life is to offer you the<br />
best possible blend between practicality and style.<br />
WIDE RANGE<br />
Now that we’ve got any potential identity confu-<br />
34<br />
MOTOR SEPTEMBER <strong>2014</strong>
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