Wednesday, August 15, 2007

BMWhat?


Farbeit for me to ever criticize my favorite car company in the whole world, BMW, but I must. They're bringing the 1-series to the United States. That in and of itself is not bad news, I'm all for more sweet Bimmer action. The problem is that they're setting this car up to cannibalize the 3-series. If they put smaller power plants in them (the old 1.8 from the mid 90s, the 2.3, the 2.5, maybe topping out at 2.8...something like that) then it wouldn't matter, they'd be in a different segment. However, they're putting their 3.5 in these bad boys (sidenote: that's how they get the model number xyy is series, engine displacement, in this case 135). It won't be as big as the current 335i, nor as heavy, so this thing is really going to move in more ways than one. It's cheaper than the 3 series by about 10 gs which will certainly give it more selling power. We'll see what happens - BMW's only option might be to raise the displacement across their product lines, leaving us with the 340i, the 550i, and the 760i as their products so that they can keep the 135i as the base product. It's a bit too much too soon for the car, but they should know what they're doing with all those years of being the Ultimate Driving Machine.

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