Road and Track comparo- Hilarious

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.

- GRL
"Paddington" > wrote in message
link.net...
>
> "Malt_Hound" > wrote in message
> ...
>
> I find it rather amusing that when you
>> peruse the "ratings" table on the final page of the article, the
>> reviewers gave top marks to the BMW in *nearly everything* that matters.
>> Yet, in the final analysis, they handed the "top dawg" award to the
>> Infinity.
>
>
> 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.
>
>

Malt_Hound wrote:

> Road and Track did a comparison of the 545iA, Infinity M45 "sport" and
> Lexus GS430. You can read it he
>
> <http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_id=31&article_id=2221>
>
> I am not a huge fan of the new fivers, and I'd prefer a 6 cylinder
> with a manual gearbox myself, but I find it rather amusing that when
> you peruse the "ratings" table on the final page of the article, the
> reviewers gave top marks to the BMW in *nearly everything* that
> matters. Yet, in the final analysis, they handed the "top dawg"
> award to the Infinity.

Count the pages of advertising for each brand...

Matt O.

bobukcat wrote:

> 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.

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.

GRL wrote:
> 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.
>
> - GRL

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