This Ain’t It, BMW

This Ain’t It, BMW

There are explanations for the following now-deleted tweet, yes, but few of them make any sense.

Minutes before the post went live, BMW deleted the tweet, but here is a screenshot:

Now let’s consider that a human or team of humans were behind this tweet, and this human or team of humans could possibly have just been having an off day. Let’s also consider that this human or team of humans possibly intended for this tweet to stir up “outrage,” and thus stories like this one, because there’s no such thing as bad publicity or whatever.

Taken on its own terms, I first interpreted the tweet to mean that buying an i8 was environmentally friendly, and that would help stop coronavirus somehow. My colleague Kristen Lee offered a different interpretation, that #FlattenTheCurve was meant to be a reference to the car’s (flattened?) curves. A different colleague, Bradley Brownell, suggested it was supposed to mean that you could use an i8 to block roads to help quarantine your town in the face of a terrifying and deadly virus.

A third colleague, Michael Ballaban, said that he was “baffled,” using a word for emphasis, and declared the tweet “word salad,” apparently against the very idea of interpreting the tweet at all.

I will leave it to you, the commenters and readers, to ultimately decide how to properly deal with this tweet. Like all tweets it will soon be forgotten, but let’s appreciate the small moments, like the moment someone at BMW or someone at a marketing firm BMW pays to tweet for it—the patient zero of this tweet, if you will, or patients zero if this was more of a workshopped kind of thing—settled on this set of words and thought to themselves, “That’s it, that’s the tweet.”

I am further obligated to remind readers that BMW is doing about the least it can to help contain coronavirus in the U.S.


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