| Monday, April 26, 2004 |
11:03 - Apples to oranges to grapes to pears
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Sometimes I get the feeling that the automotive industry is spiraling into itself, that all makes are converging on each other stylistically and technologically—that in ten years every family sedan will look like a VW Passat and cost the same amount of money. Certain segments of the industry definitely seem to be going that way.
But this months' issue of Road & Track has head-to-head comparisons of the following:
Honda Element and Scion xB
Volkswagen Phaeton and BMW 745i
Audi TT and BMW Z4
Each one of these is an apples-and-oranges comparison. The Element and the xB, for instance, are cars built to totally different scales. The TT is a heavy, upright-seated VW Golf with a Porsche 356 stapled to its face, while the Z4 is a classic low-slung roadster. And while the Phaeton and the 745i are both German luxo-boats, the Phaeton is gunning almost more for the Rolls-Royce/Maybach crowd—what with its rear-seat legroom that resembles a boat's bilge, rather than the 745i which still makes you squeeze your shins a bit—rather than precisely the BMW's market.
All this makes me think that maybe, if R&T can't seem to pull together even two comparable representatives of these three different classes of cars for a true competitive analysis, maybe the auto industry has got more thriving diversity in it today than it ever has in the past.
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Brian Tiemann
