Quote:
Originally Posted by jmg
Interesting analysis. There is some merit to what you are saying, but at what point does Kool-aid not qualify as Kool-aid as you add water? If you add a teaspoon of Kool-Aid to a swimming pool, can you honestly call it a pool of Kool-Aid? I think you call it a pool with a teaspoon of Kool-Aid in it.
Point being, there certainly is a spectrum in the M lineup, but the spectrum you described is by definition a dilution table. Dilution is what many people have a problem with. How diluted can we get for the sake of marketing? Why call an M Sport an M car other than for marketing? It is literally a dilution of the label. A teaspoon of M in a pool of passenger cars.
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Well by that same token, hardcore production M cars aren't exactly pure M vehicles either since they are still quite far from M Motorsport racecars which stand for the purest M ethos.
The point is, is there is no more magical threshold above which a non-M car suddenly becomes an M car. That threshold may have existed in the past and may have been defined by a very bespoke engine + chassis, but that era is long gone and isn't economically sustainable anymore: BMW has one well-established sporty label, and it would be dumb to only apply it to a very tiny amount of purebred vehicles and to only reserve certain features to them (e.g. M adaptive suspension, M differential, M spoiler...) when the BMW lineup has so many other models with sporty credentials which have oftentimes become benchmark vs their competition thanks to these M features (is it a bad thing?).
And as you are implying by 'dilution of the label', owning an M vehicle not only stands for special hardware but for a pedigree, a brand universe with an identifiable flavor and an important visual/esthetic component (which shouldn't matter that much to purists if they only saw M as a special driving experience, but it does). A brand universe which would have remained widely unseen in the streets and widely unappreciated had this label only been reserved to the hardcore models. Of course ideally M Sport wouldn't seem like it just usurps the pedigree by emulating the esthetic component, and would actually perform on the road (but then it needs more hardware from above, e.g. M differential, and then too purists would still complain).
Obviously there is a huge gap between an M Sport 2er Active Tourer minivan and an M2 CS (the flaws of a numerically limited nomenclature...); but again, if BMW delivers by adding new race-derived features on the hardcore M models higher up the ladder, maintaining them sensibly sportier both visually and on the road, then dilution of the label itself won't really be an arguable issue.