Road and Track comparo- Hilarious

It must have been the cup holders......

M

I'll bet John Bond is twirling in his grave over what people have done to his magazine. Jim

They pretty much did the same thing all the rags have been doing since the new 5 came out, give it extraordinarily bad ratings for looks and the IDrive, and just bad ratings for things like the interior, and ergonomics. They have finally stopped bitching about the active steering but downplay the fact that it tromps the others in all the performance stats and maintains the incredibly near-perfect weight distribution and neutrality of handling that goes with it. My favorite IDrive comment yet though is in the Autoweek column about the 545i they just added to their one year test fleet, it's something like "we keep complaining about IDrive and you keep yelling back at us saying that if you drive the car for more than 3 days you get used to it and it's not that bad". I'll have to keep an eye on their long-term test and see how they rate it over the long term. With the car mags though it always seems to be a "flavor of the day" deal and the M45 is definitely their current choice.

bobukcat

If looks were all that important, everybody would be driving a Jaguar. Jim

Yes. Total bullshit conclusion. If you look at how the "points' were awarded, the BMW some 14 points below the winner, but it lost 10 points because of the price. Fuck the price if you are buying these kinds of vehicles. Idiots. I suppose they figure that their readers are too stupid to notice the price. Just tell me which is the better car you shitheads, I'll decide if the price is a factor.

Exterior styling BMW -4 points yet the Infiniti's nose is as ugly as front ends come. Interior styling BMW -4.5 points yet the Infiniti's wooden dash makes it look like the bridge on a ship.

I have to agree. These guys are trying very hard to make the Beemer fail, especially if you consider that it outperforms the Infiniti in every respect where performance is concerned.

I once had a lecturer that gave my 9/10 or 10/10 for every section of a project I was being evaluated on, yet the mark for general impression was

8/10. So I confronted him and asked how he came to that conclusion. His answer: "Oh, it's to encourage you to do even better next time." Maybe those ID10TS just can't wait for BMWs next model, which will be even more awesome!

At the end of the day. Let them each pick a car to take home for free and they'll all take the Beemer. I know I would! (It's worth more also)

My 2c MW

Now that's a cool measure, perhaps a more telling one. Mind you, if you think people howl about favoratism now, try implementing that as comparison criteria and see what happens.

-Russ.

I find it rather amusing that when you

A few months ago they did a "best all around sports car test" with about 7 or 8 cars. The two Porsches (Boxster S and 911) got rave reviews, half the staffers picked the Boxster S and another three picked the 911, and they also cleanred up on the ratings table too. First place? The Corvette. Why? It had the best "bang for the buck". It's lunacy. If your looking for an objective opinion on a car, these magazines are not the place to look.

Reality check, the current bimmers look the way they do because SOMEBODY IN CHARGE AT BMW THOUGHT STYLING WAS ALL THAT IMPORTANT that they wanted to change the perfectly fine looks of the previous cars to something drastically different. If they think it's all that important, why don't you?

As for ergonomics, it is important because that's how the driver interacts with the car's systems and minimizing distraction is very important.

Finally, you should all be grateful that the car books grouse about current BMW ergonomics and styling...unless you actually like the ergonomics and styling (and you have my sympathy, if you do). The more public bitching there is about those things the more likely it is BMW will do something to improve them.

- GRL

You don't think bang for the buck is a valid objective criteria for comparison?

By the way, you have it exactly wrong. The personal choices are very subjective. The tabulated results are the objective part.

Count the pages of advertising for each brand...

Matt O.

I've played with iDrive a bit. It's no masterpiece of user interface design, that's for sure. In fact BMW's whole dash -- radio/HVAC controls, etc. -- has really taken a dive in the last decade, going from very good to fairly poor. While it's true things have gotten more complicated, other carmakers have done a much better job. Actually the controls in cheap cars are often well designed, because they have to be for rental car fleets, etc.

I've been involved in several tests of this kind of thing, with various contractors working for gadget companies who must remain nameless (both the contractors and the gadget companies).

BMW ought to outsource this to some real experts in the field, like Apple, or one of the contractors who design for electronics companies -- usually with backgrounds in designing controls for miltary hardware, etc. Just from looking at their work, I can tell BMW is trying to reinvent the wheel in-house, and badly.

Matt O.

No, the tabulation is of a bunch of subjective (or subjectified) values. Even inb those instances where they have hard factual data, they have "normalized" their findings to a 30 point scale./ The weighting that they used to "normalize" them would toss them all back into the subjective category since it was up to the editors to decide how important each of these measurements is.

It was 100% subjective BS.

-Fred W