Now that I’ve got your attention…

I’ve always found difficult to explain the reasons of why I liked a particular car to the average car enthusiast. You know, the sort of chap that thinks a BMW X6M is a really cool car.

I try to explain the pleasure of having an adjustable back end, or a car with a compliant ride which increases traction on bumpy roads or how great it feels to have a car with communicative steering. It feels a lot like trying to explain to Jeremy Clarkson how a limited slip differential works: neither does he understand it nor is he interested.

Most of the time you get laughed at, followed by “yes, but my Audi has S-Line written on it and it pulls 8.42gs in the corners and it is better because it says it on the brochure”.

Trying to repeat the same with a normal person feel like trying to explain quantum physics to an 8 year old. Not only does it sound like witchcraft to them but they look at you and think: it’s just a car and you are completely mad! With them it’s probably better to resort to discussing panel gaps and shut lines. You’ll get better interaction and it’ll be more constructive for both.

Clearly the number of lunatics that can understand a car like the Toyobaru or the Mazda MX-5 amounts to four. And we all know what happened to cars that have a customer base of four. They go bust. Like SAAB. Feel and handling and all those things are, quite obviously, overrated and irrelevant to 99% of the car buying public.

But it gets worse. Feel and handling are not only incomprehensible to pretty much everyone but they also cost a fortune to develop. They cost so much that even a massively large corporation like Toyota feared going on it all alone and enlisted the services of Subaru to share the risks. Alfa Romeo is co-developing their return to affordable rear wheel drive machinery with Mazda and there are more differently branded variant of the Lotus Elise that we can care to remember.

And yet.

Manufacturers still insist in them. Why on earth do they do it? I mean, it doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. No one can appreciate them and the money invested would better be spent elsewhere. Developing touchscreens and smartphone apps probably.

BMW is going front wheel drive for the next generation 1er, and frankly it doesn’t surprise me at all. What it does surprise me is that they are stopping there. Why not make a front wheel drive 3er, or a front wheel drive 5er? Scratch that, make the entire range front wheel drive! They will save a ton of money and people will still come out in droves to buy the best cars from Bavaria.

But those handling idiots… no matter how little they are, they are so hard to get rid off!