Quote:
Originally Posted by robotk
Yep. It's infuriating. This may have been posted before...
“We surveyed both current BMW 5-series customers and owners of competitive models, asking, ‘What are your wishes?’ We have two million customers around the globe who’ve purchased the 5-series during the past five years, which results in a broad spread of demands. Our job is to fulfill those mainstream needs....There was a clear request for less steering effort. No one wants bad feedback—such as a steering wheel that vibrates in response to bumps in the road.....My personal opinion is, we’re providing enough feedback to our mainstream customers. Some drive 30,000 miles per
year in their BMWs, including long trips at high speeds. So the strongest demand we heard was, ‘Please reduce the steering effort.’ They seem to want more isolation.”
-BMW driving-dynamics expert Johann Kistler
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I love that car companies at least let their engineers and internal designers be interviewed by the mass media to explain design decisions, sometimes VERY candidly. It solves many mysteries.
I don't think the main issue is losing the "raw" feel of driving. Yes, that's there, but the experience - a sporty car and enjoying the process and act of driving is more important - and than can be done with more dB, fewer dB, more NVH, less NVH. To me it's losing entire classes of cars and segments. Who's to blame for the SUV shift? The death of convertibles? Low gas prices? CAFE rules that encourage manufacturers to go SUV to build bigger cars that are less stringently monitored on the MPG front?
A huge generation of performance car fans is not being minted anymore. I think compared to simply a decade ago, the car culture is far, far weaker, and it isn't just a case of millennials not having enough money to buy cars, it's just that $1K on the digital world or $1K on a cell phone goes so much farther than $1K for 1/30th of a semi-nice car. With all the anti-car rhetoric out there cars are also culturally not "in" at all anymore. Drivers licenses among 16 year olds have fallen from something like 80% in the 80s or 90s to 40% today. Expect this trend to continue.
As for Porsche, they simply can't fight the market trends. The purist 718 may satisfy car magazine writers but one just has to look at BMW sales trends, seeing the X3 make up for the lost 2/4/6 series sales, and know what's going on (not a truly fair comparison given generational age, but still). And technology, stability controls, better platforms means that we don't have body-on-frame Ford Explorers who roll over all the time anymore from the 90s. I don't like SUVs either but everyone else does.
I also am not that into Porsche mainly because the $15K margin per car means less car for you. A nontrivial number of people who go after Porsche are after the badge, and purely driving dynamic wise, it does not excel enough.