The Bogey
It's a tricky business balancing image, performance, reputation, and price, and in the 3 Series, BMW is the role model of late--with one proviso: You get what you pay for, and the 3 Series is, almost without exception, the most expensive car in its competitive class. With that in mind, automotive writers are often criticized for being BMW-biased, swayed by some secret handshake. More often, we get letters that say something to the effect of, "Of course the BMW won your comparison. It costs the most." But the simple truth is the 3, 5, and arguably 7 Series BMWs are defined by the industry itself as dynamic benchmarks, and by you as the current aspirational cars of record.
Ask any automotive ride-and-handling, powertrain, or acoustics engineer what his "bogey" is, and he'll say BMW. Why? Because if you've driven a contemporary example, you know they're that good: sufficiently isolated, yet rewardingly agile and mostly forgiving. Engines are smooth, torquey, rev freely, sound great, and somehow, BMW horses always seem more muscular than their figures would suggest. Further, ask any marketing, public relations, demographics, or psychographics specialist who his target audience is, and he'll say the same one BMW already has. BMW owners are typically wealthy, discriminating, loyal, ambitious, and tend to "buy up" over time into the next car in the BMW series. With all this going for it, BMW has needed only small, evolutionary changes to stay ahead of the pack. The pack, however, is indeed catching up.
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